Army drone crashes into mountain

An army drone involved in a training mission crashed into a mountain to the north of Lake Aegeri yesterday afternoon.

As Daniel Reist, a spokesman for the Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport (VBS), explained, the reconnaissance drone, an ADS-95 type as shown in the photograph, crashed into a forested and uninhabited area of the mountain at 3.15 pm and was totally destroyed. At present the military are looking into precisely what happened, with air traffic control also involved.

Such drones, which are 4.61 metres long and have a wingspan of 5.7metres, are manufactured by the RUAG aerospace, defence and technology company, and have been deployed by the military since 2001, though the Swiss air force had previously acquired a fleet of 28 reconnaissance drones in 1995 for CHF 450 million. At present the Swiss army has 23 drones, of which 14 are operational, the cost of one drone alone amounting to several hundreds of thousands of francs.

This is not the first mishap to have occurred with one of these drones; one was forced to make a controlled landing by parachute near the military airfield at Emmen in the canton of Lucerne in June of 2016 (second photograph). Fortunately, no-one was injured, and damage was only slight. Prior to this, one crashed on the runway at this same airfield as a result of a technical problem in September of 2011 when damage to the tune of CHF 100,000 was caused.