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Comment by ryacko | Hacker News Reader

Collateral Murder was disturbing in the enthusiasm by the soldiers for what is a grainy video. I wonder if WWII bombardiers when looking down and seeing miniature sized vehicles and buildings were as enthusiastic as well.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstri...

Amusingly, the video starts with Wikileaks decrypted the video, but all drone feeds are unencrypted.

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It’s not a drone feed it’s form the gun sight camera of an Apache attack helicopter.

Drone traffic is now predominantly encrypted it’s not the early 2000’s anymore when you could tune into drone feeds with a satellite dish and $30 worth of software.

The aircraft flies like a plane, not a helicopter. Helicopters have very small turning radii.

I think it is from a drone.

The first sentence of the wiki page mentions that they were in two AH-64 Apache Helicopters.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri...

You seem to not understand that the gunsight is gimbaled and can rotate and zoom independently of the helicopter flight path.

Also the turn radius of a helicopter is what ever the pilot wants it too be.

For CAS you wouldn’t turn on a dime you’ll take slow wide turns to allow the gunner to maintain their engagement and for you to have better situational awareness you aren’t evading incoming fire here.

This isn’t a drone you do get such angels form fixed wing drone footage, not to mention that drones don’t come with auto cannons...

Yeah, it must've been at a pretty high altitude far away.

Too bad the pilot was flying past a building, blocking view of the civilians carrying indistinct objects. Maybe the pilot didn't know what he was doing. I suppose I will be downvoted for my views, but I abhor dishonesty.

The video is heavily edited, it was cut and over 20 min were removed by WikiLeaks that showcase the entire engagement.

There was an inquiry into this, yeah mistakes were made and quite a few lessons had to be learned but this wasn’t a joy ride.

I don't want you making decisions with ambiguous information over life or death situations.

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