THE MOTHER OF ALL DRONES
These days, when one thinks of drone aircraft, one conjures up an image of a sinister, beluga-shaped monster, whispering along at 20,000 feet on a moonless night over Iraq or Afghanistan. Inside its featureless head, synthetic aperture radar and unblinking infrared eyeballs whir, rotate, scan below and beam information to someone in an air-conditioned building in middle America.
Down below, beamed to the other side of the world in infrared, creeping Orwellian voyeurism, a group of Taliban fighters lope across a sandy plain like spectral ghosts. As they move, the silent, red, watching eye 20,000 feet above follows them. They cannot feel its stare as it is inanimate. A continent away, a controller, wearing military clothing and unit patches, selects a high magnification and the Taliban jump into focus as they enter a compound through a break in a dirt wall. Radio communications whip back and forth across the world, permissions are sought and granted, voices chat calmly. Then a white flash obliterates the images on the screen.
The image can’t help but make one cringe just a bit, despite our distaste for the terrorists below. The removal of the human from the close delivery of death leaves a strange feeling in the heart. The voices of the controllers don’t have the high pitch of someone whose very life is threatened in the execution of a war. They speak in tones one would imagine a crane operator or ferry captain might use as he or she goes about a technical, workman-like job. Even the very name of “drone” itself brings to mind a mindless animal doing the bidding of a master somewhere.
The drone now occupies an ever-growing space on the battlefield. Its utility is undeniable. The high-tech, Terminator-like image of drones belies a history that goes back nearly 100 years, to the earliest days of powered flight and even before.
As early as 1849, the Austrian ship Vulcano attacked the besieged city of Venice (then a republic) by launching unmanned balloons carrying explosives. The Viennese newspaper Die Presse reported in advance of the impending aerial bombardment, stating “Venice is to be bombarded by balloons, as the lagunes prevent the approaching of artillery. Five balloons, each twenty-three feet in diameter, are in construction at Treviso. In a favourable wind the balloons will be launched and directed as near to Venice as possible, and on their being brought to vertical positions over the town, they will be fired by electro magnetism by means of a long isolated copper wire with a large galvanic battery placed on a building. The bomb falls perpendicularly, and explodes on reaching the ground.”
The first attempt was an abject failure and Time magazine reported an account of the event (much later of course): “The balloons appeared to rise to about 4,500 ft. Then they exploded in midair or fell into the water, or, blown by a sudden southeast wind, sped over the city and dropped on the besiegers. Venetians, abandoning their homes, crowded into the streets and squares to enjoy the strange spectacle. … When a cloud of smoke appeared in the air to make an explosion, all clapped and shouted. Applause was greatest when the balloons blew over the Austrian forces and exploded, and in such cases the Venetians added cries of ‘Bravo!’ and ‘Good appetite!’ ” Reading these two passages now, one realizes that not much about the unmanned aerial weapon concept has changed, except the efficiency of it all.
When the 20th Century rolled around and brought with it the emergence of the powered flying machine, it wasn’t long before the unmanned concept was dabbled with once again. The First World War sped the development of machines, training, tactics and anti-aircraft systems. There were situations in which pilots were at greater risk when attacking. Delivering a torpedo, for instance, required a flight path of unflinching constancy for minutes at a time (in the First World War at least), while newly designed and specialized gun platforms focused on the oncoming and lumbering threat. Flying deep into enemy-held territory to deliver a bomb put pilots at great risk where air superiority was in the hands of the enemy.
One of the first and best known of the very early powered and unmanned flying machines was the Kettering Bug, a small biplane flying “torpedo” which flew in a set direction... up to 120 kilometres from its launch point. It raised many possibilities but was too unsophisticated and too late to have made any impact on a war where new technologies were emerging weekly.
Further development of pilotless aircraft continued, albeit weakly, after the First World War in both America and Great Britain, but it was the British Royal Navy and Royal Air Force that truly pushed the technology to its first true successes. The Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) and the Navy teamed up in 1925 to produce and test the world’s first “cruise missile” known as the RAE Larynx (a contraction of the words “Long Range Gun with Lynx Engine”). Larynx aircraft, looking decidedly modern compared to later pilotless aircraft, were launched two years later from a cordite-fired catapult on the forward deck of the Royal Navy destroyers HMS Stronghold and Thanet. Conceived as a long-range anti-shipping weapon, the Larynx was powered by a 200 hp Armstrong Siddeley Lynx engine and, with its 200 mph top speed, was faster than contemporary fighters. Only seven were launched during the test program, and the aircraft never saw production.
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In 1932, the Royal Navy saw the need for a realistic anti-aircraft gunnery target for anti-aircraft training—one that could take off, fly back and forth in front of the gunners and then be recovered and reused if not destroyed. At that time, flying targets were usually towed by piloted aircraft requiring a somewhat restrained approach to shooting to avoid hitting the tow aircraft. A pilotless aircraft would present a much more realistic target.
The first attempt by the Royal Navy to create a radio-controlled pilotless aircraft capable of taking off, flying and landing was the Fairey Queen, a decidedly unmilitary name. The Fairey Queen, a variant of the Fairey III reconnaissance biplane, was to be used by Royal Navy warships as a gunnery trainer... an expendable target. The Queen had an increased dihedral over the standard Fairey III, designed to improve her lateral stability for remote control. Only three were built and all were launched from HMS Valiant. The first two, including the one pictured below, set to launch from the stern of Valiant in April 1932, were lost when they crashed immediately into the sea (their flights were 18 and 25 seconds respectively). The third was successful and was recovered on the sea after its flight in September 1932. It was hoisted aboard Valiant and launched again in January of 1933 at Gibraltar whereupon the Home Fleet fired away for two hours, failing utterly to even damage the Queen. It landed safely on the Mediterranean after all ammunition was exhausted. The following May, the gunners of HMS Shropshire dispatched the Queen in just 20 minutes at Malta.
The experience with the Fairey Queen, while limited, led to the need for a production target aircraft for anti-aircraft gunnery training and eventually the development of the de Havilland DH-82B Queen Bee, the first full production, full-sized, reusable, pilotless aircraft. To the casual observer, the Queen Bee looked almost exactly like a de Havilland DH-82A Tiger Moth, but in truth it was a mash-up aircraft using the lighter, more buoyant wooden fuselage construction of the DH-60 Moth combined with the higher dihedral wings of the Tiger Moth. The aircraft could be operated remotely by another pilot or controller sitting in another aircraft, on a warship or from a control panel on land. It could operate from runways or be shot from catapults, to be recovered on floats.
The control panel utilized a simple rotary dial, using which, the controller could “dial in” a radio-transmitted command. Numbers on the dial represented commands such as “turn left, turn right, pitch-up,” etc., while additional controls operated ignition and throttle. While the control panel was relatively small, the radio transmitter itself was the size of a delivery van. The front cockpit had these same controls, enabling a test pilot to check the pilotless functions of the aircraft at altitude. The radio commands operated a series of pneumatic servos housed in the space once occupied by the rear cockpit. The design did not allow for coordinated flight using the ailerons and rudder, so the ailerons were always locked in the neutral position. Controllers used only the rudder, elevator and throttle controls.
The Queen Bee represented a major step forward on many fronts, not the least of which was radio-control. One of its immediate, if disappointing, benefits was that it revealed shortfalls in the skills and efficacy of Royal Navy anti-aircraft gunners and systems. It was not uncommon for a Queen Bee to parade up and down in front of an entire warship squadron for over an hour while they pounded away at it, only to be commanded to land without a scratch. There is even an account of the King witnessing a demonstration of Royal Navy gunnery prowess using the Queen Bee, during which the gunners were unable to hit it. One high-ranking officer was seen to turn to his subordinate and whisper “For ***** sake, tell the operator to dial SPIN”, at which point the Queen Bee dove into the sea, seemingly the victim of the gunners. The Royal Navy, British Army and Royal Air Force would utilize the Queen Bee to great extent to improve gunnery results, but the Navy soon turned to new technologies such as radar range finding and primitive computers to make warship anti-aircraft weapons the equal of modern dive and torpedo bombers.
I believe it is fairly likely that the de Havilland DH-82B got its name partially from its progenitor, the Fairey Queen, for their developments were linked. Geoffrey de Havilland was a passionate amateur entomologist, and liked to name all of his early aircraft after flying insects (Tiger Moth, Fox Moth, Mosquito, and Dragonfly), so likely chose its Queen Bee name for the connection to the Fairey and to the fact that it was the “B” model of the DH-82.
The Queen Bee was certainly the first truly successful pilotless aircraft with nearly 400 being manufactured over several years. The Queen Bee’s ability to fly without a pilot was indeed high technology at the time and it was demonstrated for dignitaries on many occasions. In 1936, Admiral William Harrison Standley, the US Navy’s representative at the London Naval Conference, was witness to a demonstration of the Queen Bee during a live-firing exercise. Upon his return to the United States, he set in motion revitalized American research into remotely flown aircraft like the Queen Bee, which could be used as a training device in the same manner.
Shortly thereafter, the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) tasked Lieutenant Commander Delmar Fahrney to lead a project to develop the system. Within months, two Curtiss N2C-2 Fledgling and two Stearman training biplanes were equipped with similar equipment to the Queen Bee. Soon, the word “drone” began appearing in documents related to the American project. According to accounts, Fahrney himself coined the term drone as a deliberate nod to the de Havilland Queen Bee.
It is not known for sure if the drone naming is fact, but it is likely. Certainly, it is an appropriate name, conjuring armies of identical, mindless animals whose sole purpose is to do the bidding of a Queen Bee mother. Regardless of the source of the new name, it stuck like honey to a picnic blanket! Before the arrival of the Queen Bee, there were certainly other attempts at birthing the remotely flown aircraft, but they were largely aborted, miscarried, stillborn or short-lived. The Queen Bee produced nearly 400 offspring and generations upon generations of evermore capable aircraft flown by operators who stand off a world away. Today, drones can do almost anything from delivering pizza to occupying the nightmares of terrorists everywhere. Any one of us can own one. They range in size from mere inches to 150-foot wingspans. They can fly for days on end and for thousands of miles. They present complex moral conundrums about the sanitized delivery of death, about who is a combatant, and many more. One thing for sure is that, as the presence of drones on the battlefield grows, the need for heroes diminishes. Using drones, the execution of a war now requires less from a country. Fading fast are the simple values of duty, honour and above all sacrifice. Of all the efficiencies, capabilities and benefits found in the modern combat drone, one of them is NOT the ability to inspire.
While much has developed, not much has changed in the 80 years since the development of the delicate contraption known as the Queen Bee. She is indeed the Mother of all Drones.
Dave O’Malley