The Telegraph: Armchair killers: life as a drone pilot
In the film Good Kill, Ethan Hawke plays a drone pilot troubled by his work. What's it really like to take a life from thousands of miles away with the push of a button?
Its nickname is Predator Porn, and Paul Rolfe used to watch it 12 hours a day. Sometimes it was horrific, sometimes it was life affirming; mostly it was just dull. But whenever fellow soldiers at his airbase in Nevada wandered past the "live feeds" from his console, he'd notice how their eyes would wander to the screen and have trouble looking away.
Small wonder. For the cameras on the Predator drones that Rolfe once operated offer a voyeuristic experience unlike no other.
Filmed from two miles up, but with a lens so powerful it feels like a hawk hovering at 100 feet, the cameras captured parallel lives in some of Iraq and Afghanistan's most hostile corners. On his screen at the Combined Joint Predator Task Force, 50 miles north of Las Vegas, Rolfe and his colleagues would watch locals going about their business, sometimes in the harsh light of the midday sun, sometimes in the black and white silhouettes of infrared night vision.
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