Tinker AFB Selected As Repair Base For Military Drones

Known as the World's Deadliest Drones, the Reaper and Predator drones have flown missions all over the world. Now they've landed in Oklahoma.

MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper: Built with 40-hour endurance capabilities, at a price tag of over $56 Million. Both have been used in over 200,000 missions to survey and eliminate terrorist targets all across the world. Hence the nickname, the world's deadliest drone.

Now for the first time, this very present and future of aerial warfare will have a dedicated repair line on a base. In a partnership with the Air Force the drone contractors, General Atomics, selected Tinker Air Force Base, due to its already vast capabilities.

"The world doesn't seem to be getting much more peaceful right now, so I would imagine we should expect more and more usage of these remotely powered aircrafts," said General Atomics' Scott Sappenfield.

Tinker's workload will focus on the ignition activation assembly or in simpler terms, the drone's spark plug.

"It's a monumental step in the right direction it is relatively small workload right now, but we feel as we demonstrate success with this workload, it opens other opportunities for us," said Kevin O'Connor with Tinker Air Force Base.

Once the parts are repaired and tested at Tinker they will be put back into the Reapers and Predators and then it's back to combat.

Tinker has already hired two personnel to work on the new repair line, but the base does expect to hire many more in the future.