MODERN DRONES EVOLVE
An inside look at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum modern UAS
Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part special report from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The first article was featured in the 2020 February issue of Model Airplane News, and looked at the development of drones from the early days of aviation up to September 10, 2001. In this continuing report, Patrick Sherman of the Roswell Flight Test Crew learns about the museum’s collection of modern drones from the curator of the Uncrewed Aircraft Systems collection, Roger Connor.
When he was designing the xenomorph for Ridley Scott’s iconic 1979 science fictionhorror classic Alien, Swiss artist H.R. Giger omitted one feature shared by virtually every macroscopic life form on Earth: eyes. Interviewed later about his work, Giger said, “We came to the conclusion that a creature without eyes, driven by instinct alone, would be far more frightening. That’s why I painted a second version of the alien that has no eyes.”
When the word “drone” burst into the public consciousness during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, it was associated with a singular aircraft: the MQ-1 Predator. Even apart from the fact that there was no pilot on board, its configuration was unfamiliar to the general public: straight, narrow wings, like a glider, for long endurance; a V-tail slung beneath the airframe; a pusher-type propeller at the rear; and, in front, a sleek, featureless dome.
Where the cockpit would have been on a crewed aircraft, there was nothing but a smooth surface painted Air Force gray.
Like Giger’s alien, it had no eyes and—like the crew of the film’s ship, Nostromo—the
American public did not enjoy what it saw.
Detractors labeled military drones “flying death robots,” and to this day there remains deep suspicion about their potential abuse, whether launching lethal strikes abroad or conducting surveillance at home.
Nevertheless, the curators of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum recognized that military drones represented the dawning of a new era in aviation, and they knew they needed to begin collecting artifacts that reflected the change happening in the skies over America’s distant battlefields.
“Before 2000, there had been some incidental inclusion of drones among our acquisitions, but no effort to systematically collect them,” said Roger Connor, who curates the museum’s Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) inventory. “After 9/11, it was clear that these were going to be a new reality in warfare, and we began the wholesale collection of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS),” he said.
Among the early standouts in the National Air and Space Museum’s efforts: Predator 3034, the first of its type to fire a Hellfire missile in combat. On October 7, 2001, it destroyed an enemy vehicle near Kandahar,
Afghanistan. The sequence of events leading up to that strike began 24 years earlier, in the garage of a single-family home in the Hacienda Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles.
“THE DRONEFATHER”
Abraham Karem was born in Baghdad, Iraq, on June 27, 1937. Being Jewish, his family moved to the newly established state of Israel in 1951. Karem had a passion for aviation as a child, building model airplanes beginning at the age of 14 and serving as an instructor for his high school aero club. He became a private pilot and graduated from the prestigious Technion-Israel Institute of Technology with a degree in aeronautical engineering.
Karem did pioneering work on drone technology in Israel, but ultimately became disenchanted with the Israeli Defense Forces acquisition policies and moved his family to the United States in 1977. Working with a small team in his garage, Karem built a 200-pound drone with a television camera in its nose, capable of flying for 56 hours—a substantial achievement at the time. He named his creation “Albatross.”
The United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) paid for a series of test flights with the Albatross, and they came away so impressed that they funded the development of a second airframe by Karem, called “Amber.” There was interest both from the U.S. Navy, looking to improve the accuracy of naval gunfire, as well as the U.S. Southern Command, which wanted to maintain persistent surveillance of the country’s border with Mexico to interdict drug shipments.
However, none of those contracts materialized, and Karem’s company was forced into bankruptcy. He, and his innovative designs, might have become a footnote to history, had his company’s assets not been acquired by defense contractor General Atomics in 1990, which then hired Karem and eight of his colleagues to continue their work.
The following year, a brutal civil war erupted in Yugoslavia, fracturing the nation along ethnic lines. Then CIA Director James Woolsey sought a low-risk means of monitoring the conflict, and remembered Karem’s groundbreaking work. The agency purchased two Gnat-750 drones—the immediate precursor to the Predator—from General Atomics, and deployed them in the skies over Bosnia.
The platform’s greatest weakness proved to be the radio links that connected the remote pilots to the aircraft, which limited how far it was able to fly from its home base. To address this issue, Karem incorporated a satellite antenna, enabling worldwide operations. However, to fit the new hardware on board the existing airframe required the addition of the distinctive dome on the nose of the aircraft.
Thus, the Predator was born, leading to Karem’s eventual recognition as “the Dronefather,” and cementing his place among the giants of American aeronautical engineering. He left General Atomics before the first flight of the Predator to found a new company, developing a UAS for the U.S. Army. His work was acquired by Boeing in 2004 and designated the A160 Hummingbird, only to be canceled by the Pentagon the following year.
At last report, Karem was still hard at work, developing a tilt-rotor aircraft the size of a 737, which he intends to compete with regional jets providing commercial air service between cities.
SUDDENLY, DRONES!
“In the year 2000, there were only 90 remotely piloted aircraft in the entire U.S. military arsenal capable of conducting reconnaissance missions,” said Connor. “Ten years later, there were 11,000 aircraft in the Department of Defense performing the same job.”
These varied in size from the Predator—which is approximately the same size as a two-seat general aviation aircraft—to handlaunched models that would not look out of place at a local Academy of Model Aeronautics flying site.
“One of the smaller UAS we’ve received is an RQ-14 Dragon Eye, which flew in Afghanistan,” Connor explained. “It’s got a bullet hole in it, and they repaired it in the field using duct tape.”
Built by AeroVironment, the Dragon Eye had its first flight in June 2001 and deployed with the U.S. Marine Corps in 2002. Launched by hand or using a bungee cord, the Dragon Eye appears almost comically simplistic, with twin electric motors turning 8-inch props; a broad, flat wing, 45 inches across; an oversized, rudderless vertical stabilizer; and no horizontal stabilizer at all. You might expect to see the same
general configuration rendered in crayon by a young child who recently attended an airshow for the first time.
In spite of its primitive appearance, 6,000 Dragon Eyes were deployed at a cost of $80,000 each, because they performed a critical function: Giving commanders of small units in the field the ability to look beyond the next hill and scout enemy positions. Remarkably quiet owing to its electric propulsion, the Dragon Eye had a maximum range of six miles, a cruising speed of 40 miles per hour, and a maximum endurance of one hour. It carried visible light and thermal imaging cameras, transmitting live video back to the operator.
Alongside hand-launched fixed-wing platforms, small uncrewed rotorcraft were also being deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the RQ-16 T-Hawk. Named for the tarantula hawk—a wasp species that preys on large spiders—the T-Hawk uses a gasoline-powered engine to turn a single ducted fan mounted in the center of the airframe. Stability and flight maneuvers are achieved by means of louvers that direct the thrust developed by the propeller.
“The T-Hawk was deployed with EOD [explosive ordnance disposal] units. They would use it to check out disturbed earth or suspicious items along the road, which could conceal IEDs [improvised explosive devices],” said Connor. “One thing about the T-Hawk is that it’s loud. It’s basically a flying lawn mower. I asked if the noise was a problem during their operations, but it turned out they were actually drilling holes in the propeller blades to make it even louder. Apparently, when the enemy heard it coming, they pulled back,” he said.
With a range of six miles, a 40-minute endurance, and a gross takeoff weight of 20 pounds, the T-Hawk is designated a micro air vehicle (MAV) as part of the Army’s Future Combat System (FCS). The Honeywell Corporation began development of RQ-14 in 2003 with $40 million from DARPA. The first units were deployed to Iraq in 2007, equipped with optical and thermal imaging cameras.
“In 2011, several T-Hawks were sent to Japan following the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station,” Connor said. “There was so much radiation in the immediate vicinity of the plant it was impossible for people to safely get close enough to see what was happening, so having drones available made a big difference.”
ON THE HOME FRONT
The T-Hawk had proven that small UAS could have civilian applications, far from the battlefield. Ironically, in the United States and Europe, hobbyists — not the aerospace industry — were among the first to explore that potential.
Having founded the Roswell Flight Test Crew the year before, it was in 2011 that I flew my own homebuilt drone alongside firefighters for the first time, drawing the notice of national public safety officials. Still, it came as quite a shock when an executive from Honeywell called to discuss the domestic use of drones—conclusive proof that, along with other pioneering hobbyists, we were in the vanguard.
During that same period, changes were happening at the National Air and Space Museum as well, according to Connor.
“In 2012 and 2013, I took over the curation of our UAS collection, and we switched from focusing exclusively on military drones to
acquiring civilian systems as well,” he said.
Among the first civilian UAS added to the museum’s collection was DraganFly’s DraganFlyer X4-ES. Developed by company founder and creator of the world’s first quadcopter, Zenon Dragan, of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, DraganFly’s early multirotor platforms became the first ever to save a human life. In 2013, outside the tiny rural community of St. Denis, a nighttime rollover car crash left the injured driver wandering aimlessly through the snowy landscape. When search and rescue teams on foot and a crewed helicopter equipped with a night vision system were unsuccessful in locating the driver, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched an X4-ES equipped with a thermal imaging camera, which located the victim, huddling under a tree.
“The doctors said he was an hour or two away from dying of hypothermia,” said Dragan, recalling the episode in news reports.
Another history-making aircraft Connor acquired for the museum is the hexacopter developed by Australian manufacturer
Flirtey; it completed the first cargo delivery mission in the United States. On July 17, 2015, the aircraft lifted off from a pharmacy in
Wise County, Virginia and flew 35 miles to a rural clinic and dropped off medicine for local patients.
Connor also counts among his trophies a ScanEagle: a long-endurance, low-altitude platform developed by Insitu, which is a
Boeing subsidiary based in the Columbia River Gorge on the border between Oregon and Washington State. Designed for military applications, the ScanEagle built upon
Insitu’s work on a previous platform, the SeaScan, which was created to gather weather data and help fishers track schools of tuna.
The first ScanEagle was deployed in Iraq in 2004, and it remains in active military service today. Then, in 2016, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted the platform a type certification, permitting its use in commercial operations in the United States. Applications have included oil and gas exploration, wildlife monitoring, and battling forest fires.
“The aircraft that we received was the first one to receive approval from the FAA to fly beyond visual line of sight in the lower 48, doing railroad right-of-way inspections for Burlington Northern Santa Fe as part of the Pathfinder program,” said Connor.
THE BEST OF THE BEST
Another landmark UAS that Connor has added to the museum’s collection are the N500VD quadcopters used by San Diego Gas & Electric to conduct the first FAAapproved utility line inspections, beginning in 2014. The system was developed by InstantEye Robotics of Andover, Massachusetts, and cost $6,000. The quads replaced crewed helicopters that had previously been used to perform the inspections—saving money, noise pollution,
carbon emissions, and risk to pilots’ lives.
There is even a celebrity among the drones Connor has acquired: the Amazon Prime Air VTOL platform featured in the
2015 advertisement featuring Top Gear television host Jeremy Clarkson. In it, Clarkson deploys his dry wit to describe how Amazon will use UAS to make deliveries within 30 minutes or less—saving the day when the family dog chews up a young girl’s soccer shoes ahead of a big match.
“Right now, we’re talking to Zipline,” Connor said, referring to the Californiabased company transporting medical supplies by drone to rural villages in Africa. “We’re always open to hearing from folks, but there are so many firsts in the drone industry that we need to be pretty selective in terms of what we are taking for our collection,” he said.
However, even representing the Smithsonian Institution, Connor reported that there are still some artifacts he would like to acquire, but has not yet succeeded in getting.
“I would like to see if I can get a
Yamaha R-MAX,” he said, referring to the 200-pound, gas-powered single-rotor helicopter developed by the Japanese industrial giant in the 1990s. It was specifically created for precision crop dusting over the small plots of farmland that dot the island nation’s countryside.
In addition, the R-MAX has been fitted with cameras and other sensors for aerial surveys, photography, academic research,
and military applications. The R-MAX flew alongside the T-Hawk to assess damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. It had previously been used to observe the eruption of Mount Usu in the spring of 2000. The R-MAX provided valuable scientific data that would have been impossible to gather otherwise, such as the buildup of volcanic ash and the accurate prediction of mudslides.
THE FUTURE AND THE PAST
“One of the great things about this job is that you are in a unique position,” said Connor. “You get to be a bridge between the past and the future. You talk to these people who are doing amazing things with drones, but they don’t necessarily understand what has come before, and how they fit into the sweep of history.”
As an example, he cited urban air mobility and the autonomous platforms under development by Airbus, Bell, eHang, Volocopter, and many others, to carry passengers above traffic-clogged streets and highways to their specific destination. It represents the cutting edge of electricpowered VTOL [vertical takeoff and landing] development, but according to Connor, the idea goes back to the 1940s.
“Back then, the idea was that everyone would have a helicopter in their garage,” he said. “Obviously, it didn’t work out that way, but it’s still useful to understand the history. For example, most people don’t remember that in 1965, 1.25 million people moved by helicopter airline services.”
That tension, between illuminating the past and inspiring the future, lies at the heart of the National Air and Space Museum’s mission—and the Institution itself is changing to keep pace with the times. In 2016, the UAS exhibit at the west end of its National Mall location was dismantled and packed away as part of a major remodel.
“One of our new galleries is going to be titled We All Fly, Connor said. “It’s going to look at noncommercial access to aviation, including home builders, general aviation, and hobbyists. We are also going to introduce an innovation gallery that will focus on the latest developments, like autonomy and urban air mobility, and ask questions like, ‘How much autonomy should we embrace?’ and, ‘Who benefits from urban air mobility?’”
According to Connor, drones will continue to be an important and growing focus of the museum’s collection as well.
“As a historian, I will admit to a certain degree of skepticism regarding the development of UAS,” he said. “It’s our job to distinguish between rhetoric and reality, but I’m continually surprised by how fast this industry is moving forward.”
While continuing to ask important social and ethical questions, Connor believes the institution also has a role to play in helping the public grasp the real-world capabilities, and limitations, of UAS technology.
“We want to make this subject accessible. We want to educate the public—ease apprehension and grow understanding” he said. “People will be a lot more comfortable if they understand the beneficial applications drones are making possible, and that isn’t a message they get on the evening news.”
Perhaps Connor’s greatest hope for the future is the impact the drone revolution is having on the next generation of aviators, innovators, and entrepreneurs.
“Ten to 15 years ago, I would see young people going into aviation get disillusioned almost immediately,” he said. “Just over the past several years, we’ve seen more excitement and interest around this field than at any time since the 1950s and 1960s.”
Connor concluded, “There are opportunities for individuals, people who have good ideas, to come in and really change the whole industry. Today, young people can doodle something in their notebook and make it real. That’s what makes this an extraordinary moment in the history of flight.”