Two Aircraft Reportedly Missed Impact By Just Six Feet

Classified video from an incident which occurred in 2004 over Afghanistan in which a German Luna UAV came with about six feet of colliding with an Afghan Airbus A300 with 100 people on board has surfaced on the Internet. The video, which was taken from the UAVs on board camera, shows the the two aircraft nearly colliding, and then the drone becoming caught in the airliner's wake turbulence.

The video has sparked heated debate in Germany, which is considering the purchase of up to 16 larger UAVs without anti-collision technology. German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the collision avoidance systems would make the Heron TO UAVs under consideration too expensive.

The video is from an 88 pound Luna UAV, according to a report appearing on the U.K. news site MailOnline, a service of The Daily Mail newspaper. The wreckage of the Luna was never recovered, according to the paper. The German magazine Der Spiegel estimates that the two aircraft came less than two meters, or about six feet, from colliding near Kabul, Afghanistan.

Two weeks ago, Defense Minister de Maiziere abandoned a plan to purchase additional Euro Hawk UAVs on which the German Government had already spent nearly $664 million. His reasoning for ditching the program was partly based on concerns that EASA would not approve the aircraft because it lacks collision avoidance technology. He has come under pressure to reveal if he knew of possible problems with the aircraft while continuing to spend money on the program.

(Image from YouTube video)

FMI: YouTube Video, German Defense Ministry