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Police drone crashes into SWAT team vehicle in test run

It was supposed to be a big day for the men and women at the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office. The police force north of Houston, Texas are the first department south of the border with its own $300,000 aerial drone and they had everything set for one heck of a debut. But the high-priced machine was far from impressive in its first test run.

A report from The Examiner sets the scene:

"As the sheriff's SWAT team suited up with lots of firepower and their armored vehicle known as the "Bearcat," a prototype drone from Vanguard Defense Industries took off for pictures of all the police action. It was basically a photo opportunity, according to those in attendance."

A combat vehicle and "lots of fire power?" Sounds like a shot from the set of The Expendables 2. It's just too bad they didn't put as much preparation into the camera as they did the contrived scenery.

"[The] prototype drone was flying about 18-feet off the ground when it lost contact with the controller's console on the ground," reports The Examiner. "It's designed to go into an auto shutdown mode...but when it was coming down the drone crashed into the SWAT team's armored vehicle."

Thankfully, all members of the SWAT team were safe inside the Bearcat, but the fact that the drone crashed right into a police vehicle simply exacerbates the machine's failure. This would have been just another blooper for the six o'clock news — something to laugh at, since nobody was hurt — but the upsetting implications of this drone fail are far from humorous.

"This is exactly why we have reason to raise multiple eyebrows at Congress, which wants to allow hundreds of similar drones to fly over US airspace," reveals Sam Biddle in a Gizmodo story. "These drones are still a relatively young technology, relatively unproven, and relatively crash-prone. The odds of being hit by one are low, of course, but should a Texas-style UAV plummet ever happen in, say, a dense urban area, nobody would be laughing. Not all of us are driving around in Bearcats."

(Gizmodo photo)