Some numbers on the pilot side of the drone wars

“As Stress Drives Off Drone Operators, Air Force Must Cut Flights” is a New York Times story with some numbers to quantify the drone wars from the pilots’ side. It seems that taxpayers are funding 1,200 Air Force drone pilots. They handle about 65 flights per day (nearly 24,000 per year or about 20 flights per year per pilot; given the minimum of 14 hours of endurance for a drone it may be the case that more than one pilot is needed to handle a typical flight). Based on these demographics it seems that drone pilots are roughly 10 percent of all Air Force pilots.

[The drone-flying job is probably one of the best in the Air Force from the perspective of keeping a marriage together or reducing the damage from a divorce lawsuit. As noted in the “Practical Tips” chapter, serving in the military invites disaster in family court:

Attorneys described active-duty military personnel as “sitting ducks” for divorce, custody, and child support plaintiffs. “If you were serving in Iraq for the last year,” noted one lawyer, “how could you possibly show that you were the historical primary caregiver?” Forum shopping is easy for a patient military spouse. If sole custody of children is desired, for example, the future plaintiff can wait for the family to be moved from Arizona (50/50 custody presumption) to Massachusetts or California. If alimony is desired, the future plaintiff can wait for the family to be moved from Texas to Florida. If profitable child support is sought, the future plaintiff can wait for the family to be moved from Nevada to Wisconsin or New York.

“Military divorce rate at highest level since 1999” (December 13, 2011; USA Today) says that the military divorce rate is slightly higher than the U.S. civilian divorce rate.

Drone pilots are most likely to be stationed in Nevada, a state where a higher-income spouse is statistically much less likely to be sued for divorce due to the limited profitability of obtaining custody of children. As explained in the Nevada chapter, child support revenue in Nevada is capped at $13,000 per year per child. That’s still comfortably above the $4300/year in increased spending incurred by the typical American couple (see the summary of UCLA Economist Bill Comanor’s presentation) and above the $6,000 per year that could be collected in Germany, but only a fraction of the cash obtainable in neighboring California, for example. As noted in the Rationale chapter, statistical research shows that there are more divorces when the cash rewards are larger:

Brinig and Allen (Family Law Quarterly, v. 45(2), Summer 2011, pp. 140-151): “Not counting custody as a gain in the calculation of child support means that guidelines will tend to ‘double count’ the award for custody. Within a [state that uses a simple percentage of the loser parent’s income], the custodial parent of a wealthy noncustodial parent gets the utility from custody, plus a high cash transfer to fund the child expenses. … Prior to the introduction of support guidelines [mandated by the Federal Family Support Act of 1988], child support awards were considered inappropriately low in many policy circles. However, the lower amounts may well have reflected the courts’ awareness that the custodial parent obtained custody over one of the most valuable assets of the marriage: the children.” In the same article, titled “Child Support Guidelines, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Brinig and Allen note that this has given parents who expect custody a “large” incentive to file divorce lawsuits and found that divorce rates went up as predicted by these incentives.

]