A Hermes 900 drone of the Philippine Air Force (PAF) crashed Saturday morning near a popular mountain resort in Baungon town in Bukidnon province on Saturday afternoon, May 28. The military reported no casualties or major damage to any private property.
Major Francisco Garello, the spokesperson of the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, said the drone “fell” in the vicinity of Ultra Winds Mountain Resort in Baungon town. The resort is near the old Lumbia airport of Cagayan de Oro, where the PAF’s Tactical Operations Group in Northern Mindanao is based.
Colonel Menard Mariano, the PAF spokesperson, said the Hermes 900 crashed on a vegetated area in Baungon town. It took off from the Lumbia airport at around 9:30 am for a functional check flight (FCF), ascending some 10,000 feet.
“After finding the FCF procedure to be satisfactory, the pilots declared the termination of the test and started to descend 5,000 feet, 1.5 miles east of Lumbia airport,” Mariano said.
He said communication with the UAV was lost at around 11:46 am.
“All emergency procedures were performed and field service representatives were called for troubleshooting,” Mariano said.
He said the PAF will be conducting a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the accident.
The Philippine Air Force (PAF) said Monday the scattered parts of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone that crashed in Bukidnon province will not be removed until the investigation is over.
Lt. Col. Harold Hernando, commander of PAF’s Tactical Operations Group-10, said this is a standard protocol in order to identify the factors that caused the Israeli-made Hermes 900 UAV to malfunction mid-air.
“The crash site has no houses in the vicinity and there are no people,” Hernando told reporters in an interview.
The UAV crashed in Barangay Pualas, Baungon town, and investigation is ongoing as government troops continue to secure the crash site despite Monday’s rainy weather.
According to the PAF, the UAV took off from the Lumbia airport to perform a “functional flight check” but it “lost contact” during descent shortly before noon on Saturday. It was not immediately known if the UAV was damaged beyond repair, but Hernando said the drone did not cause injury to any civilian when it crash-landed.
A boy points to pieces of material that residents claim are part of the Israel-made Hermes 900 drone that crashed in Barangay Pualas, Baungon town, Bukidnon, Saturday May 28, 2022
Col. Menard Mariano, PAF spokesperson, said a combined team of police officers and Army and Air Force personnel is keeping watch over the UAV.
“The UAV is still in the area, this is being secured by the Army, the police, and the Air Force,” Mariano said in a text message Sunday.
Witnesses said the UAV had circled the several times in the air then it began to nosedive, and grazed a tree before crash-landing into a thickly vegetated ravine just a few hundred meters away from a mountain resort in Pualas. Jonie Binalhay, 30, a driver of a construction company, said he and other workers were taking a break when they saw the drone going down.
“When it got nearer to the ground, we can hear the sound of its engine. It flew past us then we heard a booming thud when it crashed. We didn’t hear any explosion or see any fire or smoke emanating from it,” Binalhay said in the vernacular.
Hernando said they will retrieve the crashed drone “the soonest possible time” and to bring it back to the Lumbia airfield. He also said the drone has been at the Lumbia airfield, but it “has been deployed here for a while.”
The Philippine Air Force (PAF) grounded the rest of its light plane-sized Hermes 900 drones after one crashed near a popular mountain resort in Bukidnon province near Cagayan de Oro on Saturday, May 28.
Colonel Meynard Mariano, the PAF spokesman, told Rappler on Monday, May 30, that eight of the remaining Israel-made unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been ordered grounded until PAF was done with an ongoing investigation.
Photo: PNA photo by Jigger Jerusalem
Sources: Rappler; Philippine News Agency;
I think it would be technically informative and beneficial to interested readers to know what kind of C2 communications solution was utilized in the scenario described, if the failure was caused by loss of comms, as informed by the PAF. Could you provide info on tat or refer me to the appropriate source? Please, notice this inquiry refers to a static configuration information only, having nothing to do with the actual accident or its probable causes. Thanks a lot, Eduardo
That’s all the information that we have at the moment.
I imagine that more details will become available when they complete the accident investigation…