I spent hours making adjustments to the wheelchair my Mother used for a couple of months after a bad drug reaction, and was never able to make it really comfortable for her because the adjustments were just too course.

This has been a problem forever. The state insisted on having the road run right along the coast, and the military put in runways that got the aircraft over the Gulf as soon as possible to eliminate worries about damage to civilian property.

Of course, there’s a big difference between that and the QF-4. The QF-4 is *big*. If it crashed on a populated area, it could cause major carnage, especially if it hit a school or sports stadium or something. Furthermore, the QF-4 is flown domestically, so we actually *care* that it could cause major carnage, while if a crashing Predator wipes out an Afghan tent school full of little tykes, well, eh, they’re just ragheads, right? (Cynical take on the American military’s mentality towards death of Afghan civilians, but probably all too accurate). Being able to blow up the QF-4 into nice-sized chunks while it’s still up in the air is thus preferable to having a 20 ton aircraft go smashing into someone’s elementary school, all those adorable little tykes being pulled out of the smoking ruins of the school would be, like, bad press, y’know. But it does mean that they have to deal with the problem that the Predator drivers don’t have to deal with — i.e., what to do about a crashed plane whose self-destruct explosives may, or may not be armed. A 20 ton crashed plane. A 20 ton crashed plane that contained enough explosives in the first place to turn it into shards a few pounds in size at most. *Decidedly* the kind of situation that gives base commanders gray hairs and causes bomb disposal squads to need Depends!