AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth
An unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan, on a moon-lit night, Jan. 31, 2010.
Thursday, Sept. 10, 2015 | 12:52 p.m.
Looking to address the unique strains placed on military drone operators, an Air Combat Command team is conducting two days of interviews with Creech Air Force Base pilots and their families.
The meetings, which began this morning, are part of the Air Force’s newly formed Culture and Process Improvement Program to address quality-of-life issues facing operators who fly the Reaper and Predator drones. The remote-controlled aircraft are often used for surveillance and to conduct targeted strikes.
Creech, about 50 miles outside of Las Vegas, is one of the primary outposts for the missions.
In recent months, the Air Force has acknowledged that its operations have placed a tremendous amount of stress on some of its drone pilots.
Although the pilots are often thousands of miles from the aircraft they operate, researchers have found they experience mental health issues at the same rate as pilots of manned combat jets.
And with the military facing a shortage of pilots and increased demand, pilots often log four times as many hours as manned-aircraft pilots.
“A lot of assumptions were made over the years, and people don’t realize how stressful and overworked the (drone) field is,” said Col. Troy Jackson, the officer leading the program.
The team’s visit to Creech is the first of 12 scheduled this month. The goal is to find quick fixes to small problems and identify larger issues facing drone pilots.
“This isn’t about fixing chow halls, gyms or the other base amenities that have been looked at before,” Jackson said. “We want to provide the (drone pilot) community the same level of holistic quality of life and professional development as other weapon systems, and this is a step toward it.”
The team plans to present its findings next month to the commander of the Air Combat Command.
To collect interviews with as many service members as possible, the team advertised its visits on a Facebook page and posted “Office Space” and “Family Guy” memes to a blog. After negative media attention about the memes, the team removed them from the blog.
