A Brief History of Drones
An inside look at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum’s UAS collection
Editor’s note: In this special, two-part report from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., Patrick Sherman of the Roswell Flight Test Crew sits down with curator Roger Connor to talk about the museum’s rapidly expanding collection of modern uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) as well as the history of drones, which begins not long after the Wright brothers’ historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
To me, the National Air and Space Museum is much more than one nation’s repository for aviation memorabilia: It is a secular shrine, a place to encounter the artifacts that will forever define human achievement in aeronautics. Among these sacred relics are the Bell X-1, the first aircraft to exceed the speed of sound, with ace pilot Chuck Yeager at the controls; the Spirit of St. Louis, which Charles Lindbergh successfully guided to the first nonstop, solo crossing of the Atlantic; and the Wright Flyer, designed, built, and flown by Orville and Wilbur Wright, a pair of bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio.
At the dawning of a new era in aviation, defined by pilotless aircraft weighing just a few pounds, I was curious to see how the Smithsonian is adapting. To be sure, it is collecting and preserving the aircraft that make historic contributions, according to
Roger Connor, who curates the museum’s drone collection. As we began our discussion, however, he turned first to the history of drones—a gentle reminder that the future always flows from the past.
“The very first efforts to build an autonomous aircraft in the early 20th century were aimed at creating an aerial torpedo, such as the Curtiss-Sperry Flying Bomb and the Kettering Bug,” Connor explains.
Both of those designs are not “drones” in the modern sense of the word. Rather, they are the distant ancestors of the cruise missile. They used mechanical gyroscopes and an aneroid barometer to maintain straight and level flight.
To determine the range to target, a separate mechanism counted off the number of revolutions the propeller shaft turned.
That could then be equated to the distance flown, after factoring in wind direction and speed, to determine when the aircraft should release its payload or plunge into its prey.
If you’re skeptical about its accuracy, you have good judgment. During its initial testing, the Curtiss-Sperry aircraft, after a 30-mile flight, managed to consistently drop a bag of sand—a stand-in for a bomb—within two miles of its intended target. As for the Kettering Bug, a prototype was delivered to the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1918, months before the end of World War I. It, however, was never deployed in combat. Commanders feared what might happen as it flew over friendly troops on its way toward the German lines.
“Near the end of World War I, they are beginning to look at putting something that resembles a modern-day radio-control system inside a full-size airplane,” says Connor. “However, owing to the absence of effective shielding, even the spark plugs firing in the engine would jam the radios.”
Progress was slow. Nevertheless, the French and then the Americans were able to develop a system that actually worked, with the goal of using these guided aerial torpedoes to attack enemy battleships.
“They could take off, maneuver, and land,” Connor says. “However, the speed was only about 100 knots—so not super fast. Combined with the limited payload, that meant they were unlikely to penetrate a battleship’s armor, and the effort dissipated through the 1920s.”
ENTER THE DRONE
Beginning in the 1930s, the British Navy expressed renewed interest in remotecontrol airplanes. The aerial torpedo had never become a serious hazard to the heavily armored battleships that ruled the seas, but a new airborne threat had emerged: conventional, crewed aircraft carrying armor-penetrating bombs that could attack from above, where battleships were most vulnerable.
“The Royal Navy needed to be able to train their gun crews to shoot down these planes,” Connor explains. “It was quite a challenge: the ship is maneuvering, the planes are maneuvering—there just wasn’t a good way to simulate it. They needed to shoot down real airplanes.”
The solution was the first modern operational drone as we would recognize it today, built from the de Havilland DH.82 Tiger Moth biplane. Essentially a full-size RC model, the DH.82B Queen Bee could be operated by a pilot on land, aboard ship, or even from another aircraft. Fortunately, the Royal Navy did not have to contend with the limitations of 14 CFR Part 107.
In total, 380 Queen Bees were built, with a 300-mile range, a service ceiling of 17,000 feet, and a maximum speed of 100 miles per hour.
On a fateful day in 1936, U.S. Navy
Adm. William Harrison Standley attended a conference in London and had the opportunity to see the Queen Bee in action during a live-fire training exercise. Returning home, he established a program to develop a remotely piloted aircraft for gunnery training, placing it in the hands of Lt. Cmdr. Delmar Fahrney.
“It’s Fahrney who first uses the word ‘drone’ to describe an uncrewed aircraft,” says Connor. “It was a tip of the hat to the British and the Queen Bee that got it started.”
The American program converted a total of four training aircraft to radio control during its initial testing. “These were obsolete planes. And they were so rickety that if they lost control, the crew on the control plane had a Tommy gun and they would just shoot it out of the sky,” he says.
These early drone experiments were a closely guarded military secret, so the occasional fly-away that was witnessed by the public created enormous concerns that the program would be revealed.
“There was one case where a drone went down over Maine,” Connor says. “The recovery crew was really worried that it would give up the game. However, when they arrived, the townspeople had talked themselves into thinking that they had seen a pilot bailout.”
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
At about the same time Fahrney is creating his first full-size drone aircraft on the East Coast, Hollywood actor Reginald Denny was working on what we might recognize as the first true radio-control model airplane in California. A trained pilot, Denny was fascinated by a model that was being flown (unsuccessfully) by his neighbor’s son.
Inspired by the potential, he opened a small hobby shop on Hollywood Boulevard, although it failed after two years. He also launched Reginald Denny Industries to produce his own models. By 1938, he had created the Radioplane One. Although it was almost uncontrollable, a U.S. Army general believed it could make a useful target for training antiaircraft gunners. “The Army wanted something small and cheap,” Connor explains.
Before it was purchased by the Northrop Corporation in 1952, Denny’s company had produced nearly 70,000 target drones for the U.S. armed forces, and made important breakthroughs in remote control, such as using a joystick to maneuver the airplane. The success and ultimate sale of
the company was a reversal of fortune for Denny, who had been well paid as an actor in the 1920s and 1930s but lost his fortune in financial speculation. Even after becoming wealthy again through his aeronautical innovations, Denny continued his acting career. His final role was Commodore Schmidlapp in a 1966 production of Batman, starring Adam West as the caped crusader and Burt Ward as Robin.
“With the outbreak of World War II, there was renewed interest in flying bombs,” Connor says. “Both the United States and Germany were pursuing the technology, although, at first, none of it worked particularly well—especially against hardened targets.”
The most famous example to emerge from these efforts was the V-1. The first of Hitler’s “vengeance weapons” deployed toward the end of the war, it was known by the British as the “buzz bomb” for the distinctive sound made by its pulse jet engine. The direct forebearer of the modern cruise missile, the V-1 had an autopilot with essentially the same capabilities as the Curtiss-Sperry Flying Bomb and the Kettering Bug. An anemometer installed on the missile’s nose measured its airspeed to derive the distance traveled, determining when it would plunge into a steep dive and explode. It carried a 2,200-pound warhead and flew at 400 miles per hour. By the end of the war, the V-1 was consistently striking within seven miles of its aim point.
“As a military weapon, it was ineffective,” says Connor. “However, it was a heavy draw on British resources, and that was a big part of the appeal from Germany’s perspective. The British had to assign antiaircraft guns and fighter planes to shoot them down, and that meant those resources were not available for the war in Europe.”
FPV IN 1943
After fortified Nazi structures, such as U-boat pens and V-1 launch sites, proved effectively immune to conventional bombing, the United States began to consider a new approach to deliver a pinpoint strike. In 1943, Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold initiated a program to strip expendable bombers of nonessential gear, fit them with advanced remote-control systems, and pack them full of explosives to slam directly into these targets.
Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, famed for his raid on Tokyo in 1942, approved the effort moving forward as Project “Aphrodite,” while a parallel effort by the Navy advanced under the code name Project “Anvil.”
These massive flying bombs, carrying up to 30,000 pounds of Torpex —a British-made explosive with 50 percent greater yield than TNT—employed a control system that is familiar to every drone-racing pilot today.
A television camera was mounted in the nose of the attacking plane, which would send a signal to an accompanying “mothership”: another airplane fitted with a video receiver, a display screen, and a controller for the remote pilot, who would guide it into its target. First-person view (FPV) as we know it today was born in the bloody skies over Europe during World War II.
The system was quite crude compared to the standards of modern FPV racing gear. Human pilots were required to take off and fly the attack plane to the vicinity of its target. They would then hand over control to the remote pilot and bail out. In total, 14 missions were launched, and none ever successfully destroyed their targets.
Many of the pilots were killed, including the son of a Massachusetts senator. The son was a Navy pilot who volunteered to fly a Project “Anvil” mission against a German submarine base at Heligoland in the North Sea. Shortly after he armed the payload, the plane exploded in midair.
It was a heartbreaking loss for the senator, who had believed that his son might one day become president of the United States. Further, his next eldest son was also in harm’s way, commanding a patrol boat in the South Pacific. His name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
“After the war, we see the first application of remotely piloted and autonomous aircraft to do the sort of ‘dull, dirty, and dangerous’ work that has brought attention to drones in recent years,” says Connor.
Among those first missions: flying directly through the mushroom cloud that rose above Bikini Atoll during the 1946 testing of America’s new atomic arsenal. The aircraft were converted B-17 bombers and F6F Hellcat fighters, flown remotely from control aircraft operating safely outside the blast zone. They carried cameras and equipment to measure the radiation from the bomb.
“The oldest remotely piloted aircraft we have on display at the museum right now is one of those Hellcats,” Connor says. “It was catapult launched from the aircraft carrier [USS] Shangri-La, and it was given to the museum because of its history of ‘atomic penetration.’”
By the late 1950s, there was growing interest in the use of drones for reconnaissance by the U.S. military. “In 1957 and 1958, there is a huge feud between the Army and the Air Force over who will control these remotely piloted aircraft because the Air Force doesn’t want the Army to have any aviation assets of its own,” Connor explains.
Nevertheless, the Army moved forward and acquired the RP-71 Falconer, developed by Radioplane—by then a division of the Northrop Corporation—as well as the SD-2 Overseer, manufactured by Aerojet General. Drones also continued to serve as targets for
aerial-gunnery exercises—among them, the jet-powered Ryan Firebee.
In the 1960s, the use of drones by the United States expanded dramatically. On May 1, 1960, a U-2 spy plane operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was shot down flying over the Soviet Union. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, ejected safely but was captured by the Soviets. “That incident proved that the Soviet-made SA-2 surfaceto-air missile could hit pretty much anything, so it was probably best not to risk air crews on these missions—and the CIA turned to autonomous aircraft,” says Connor.
With the entry of the United States into the Vietnam War, the need for aerial reconnaissance continued to increase. Following the success of the Firebee, the Ryan Aeronautical Company—now operating as Teledyne-Ryan—developed the Firefly and Lightning Bug. “These were launched from under the wing of a DC-130,” Connor explains. “They would then fly a set course and be recovered by parachute.
One individual aircraft survived a total of 60 missions.”
This was in spite of the fact that the
North Vietnamese Air Force would use the American drones for target practice, shooting down at least six of them over the course of the war. The aircraft were so successful that they remained in the military’s arsenal until 2003 and the start of the Iraq War, when they were used to lay down chaff corridors to confuse Iraqi air defenses.
DRONE, INTERRUPTED
“After Vietnam, the Army tries to reinvent itself,” says Connor. “They made the case—ˆ la Tom Clancy—that there could be a limited nuclear war in central Europe, and the United States and its allies would be forced to confront a massive Soviet invasion. It was in response to this threat that the United States developed the weapons systems that remain the mainstays of our heavy ground forces to this day, such as the M1A1 Abrams tank and the AH64 Apache attack helicopter.”
To supplement these new platforms, the Army developed the Aquila, identified as a “RPAODS” (Remotely Piloted Aerial Observer Designator System)—having no connection to the UAS currently under development by Facebook of the same name. In 1975, the Army put the project out to bid following promising results from early Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency testing, awarding the contract to the Lockheed Corporation. There is a reason, however, that you have never heard of it, according to Connor. “It was a complete disaster—an ‘everything but the kitchen sink’-type design,” he says. “The Army deliberately buried it, and it completely poisoned them against any sort of remotely piloted aircraft for tactical reconnaissance.”
On the other side of the world, however, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were learning the exact opposite lesson about drones. In
1973, Israel had been caught unprepared by an Egyptian assault that advanced across the Suez Canal in an effort to reclaim the Sinai Peninsula, along with a coordinated attack on the Golan Heights by Syria. For three days, the invaders made steady progress, before the IDF counterattacked and began pushing them back into their own territory. After weeks of fighting that saw heavy casualties on all sides, the conflict ended with a cease-fire brokered by the United Nations.
“After that, the Israelis were really back on their heels,” says Connor. “They realized that they needed much better recon. The looked at the Lightning Bug but also began to develop their own low-cost, indigenous platforms.”
The initial results of these efforts was the Tadiran Mastiff, a propeller-driven, fixed-wing aircraft capable of delivering real-time video to its operators, who could guide it in response to changing circumstances on the ground. The development of these capabilities has led to the Mastiff being recognized as the first modern military reconnaissance drone.
During the war in Lebanon that began in 1982, U.S.
Navy ships were stationed offshore to support a U.S.-led peacekeeping coalition intended to support the government in Beirut. This provided the
Navy with an opportunity to observe the Mastiff in action. “They recognized it would be an extremely useful tool for directing naval gunfire from offshore,” Connor explains.
Following on the success of the Mastiff, Israel developed the RQ-2 Pioneer, which was first deployed in 1986 and later acquired by the U.S. Navy.
During the Gulf War in 1991, it was an RQ-2 launched from the battleship USS Wisconsin that famously received the surrender of a group of Iraqi troops—an aircraft the Smithsonian eventually sought for its collection.
PAST AS PROLOGUE
On September 10, 2001, the American people went to bed still warmed by the dying embers of the Cold
War, confident that they had witnessed the end of history. Forty-eight hours later, nearly 3,000 American citizens had been killed and the nation had already embarked on what was to become its longest war.
It’s a conflict that continues to this very day, and one which introduced us all to a new vocabulary: “enemy combatant,” “extraordinary rendition,” and (most especially) “drone.” Suddenly, a technology that had developed in the shadows over the past 100 years was a topic of universal conversation. Time magazine even featured a military drone on the cover of its February 11, 2013, issue—flying menacingly over an ordinary American neighborhood.
A few years after 9/11, the introduction of the smartphone brought forth new technology that enabled the first reliable, low-cost multirotor platforms to take flight, and suddenly it seemed that drones would not only reshape warfare but also society as a whole. For Connor and his colleagues at the National Air and Space Museum, that meant recognizing that a new era in aviation was just beginning.