Drone expert led dual lives
Bobbi Swan, whose secret lives explored the frontiers of drone technology and sexual identity, died Dec. 26. She was 88.
Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Robert Rowland Schwanhausser went on to become publicly recognized as an expert on military surveillance drones, which he helped develop at San Diego’s Ryan Aeronautical and its successor, Teledyne Ryan.
Much of the work was classified, involving covert missions to wartime Vietnam and the Middle East. Also secret: the engineer’s life as a cross-dresser and the growing conviction that his genuine self was female.
In January 2003, after three years of hormone therapy and living as a woman, Robert Schwanhausser, then 72, underwent surgery, emerging as Bobbi Swan.
“This is a very slow transition,” Bobbi Swan told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2007. “I’m still adjusting to myself. It’s a continual thing. It’s a healthy thing.”
Interviewed for a 2018 book, “To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews With Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults,” she stressed the ongoing nature of the transformation.
“I think people talk in either/or terms, right? Before transition and after,” she said. “But to me, it’s really development. I’m proud of both lives. I’m proud of both mes, if you see what I’m saying. And I feel it has been a remarkable thing to have happened to a person.”
A graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Schwanhausser served in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. In January 1960, he was hired to head Ryan’s “Skunk Works,” a secret lab in an anonymous warehouse in San Diego.
The lab’s mission: researching the military applications for remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, the term then used for drones.
With his team, Schwanhausser developed 36 drone models. He was often in the field, making under-theradar trips to Bien Hoa airfield north of Saigon, carrying a rifle and sometimes coming under fire.
The work could be nerveracking and perhaps contributed to the engineer’s heart attack in 1968. The next year, colleagues noticed a dramatic increase in his alcohol consumption.
His colleagues, though, praised the man and his work. “He was a brilliant man and a fine man,” Cliff Smith, one of the drone engineers, said in a 2007 interview. “He should be getting more credit for the work he did.”
“Priorities,” he said, when asked why he waited until he was 72 to complete the transition to female. “My priorities were airplanes and getting established in the airplane business. Obviously, that was a man’s business.”
Swan is survived by sons Robert H. and Mark P. Schwanhausser, five grandchildren and other relatives.