Originally Posted by
rickair7777
What he said. At one point the pred fleet had suffered a 50% loss rate, with only one or two of those combat related. That's cost effective (sort of, by military standards) for continuous ISR, but not for pax ops, or commercial cargo ops.
They also found out that they cannot actually fly them safely over long-range comms (ie SATCOM). Even the speed of light suffers latency over satellite ranges, and through comms hardware. You can manage the FMS and mission by SATCOM, but they had to go back to line-of-sight for landings.
Also they've experienced more "hands on" man hours per flight hour vs a similar sized F16 squadron. Until it's a cheaper and more reliable platform it's not in the running.