“The story of this drone and the life and times of its maverick designers proved irresistible fascinating.”

By Steve Mills

THE PRICELESS PARTS of the world’s first unmanned military drone are carefully preserved in Britain’s prestigious Imperial War Museum.

The items include the hundred-year-old aircraft’s radio equipment along with the transmitter gear that operators used to fly the machine from the ground.

The first World War had been raging for over two years when the remote-controlled monoplane made its maiden voyage in 1917 — just eight years after Louis Blériot embarked on the first flight across the English Channel.

I discovered that these items were in the IWM collection before writing my book The Dawn of the Drone. I simply couldn’t let these iconic and beautifully intricate assemblies of brass and copper mounted on varnished bases lie on the shelf of the museum without committing their history to paper. The story of this drone and the life and times of its maverick designers proved irresistibly fascinating.

I knew that details of the original radio-guidance system was already on file. They were compiled in a comprehensive set of secret patents written by the designer Dr. Archibald Montgomery Low in 1917, but not published until the 1920s.

Low was an officer in the wartime Royal Flying Corps who commanded the service’s secret Experimental Works in Feltham, London. He had been tasked with organizing a team that would produce a control system for an unmanned aircraft capable of attacking the German airships that were bombing allied cities. A rudimentary television system that he had demonstrated in London just before the war was the basis for his design. We know the details of this TV, its sensor array camera, signal transmission and digital receiver screen because they were recorded in an American consular report.

Like the Wright Brothers Flyer of 1903, the 1917 RFC drones were not an end-product, but rather the inspiration for continued development. Orville and Wilbur Wright did not demonstrate their machine in public until they went to France in 1908. Indeed, in those intervening years from 1903, many in the U.S. accused the two as being either “fliers or liars.” In fact, the Wrights were not recognized as ‘first in flight’ by the Smithsonian Museum until 1942. Both brothers had passed away before their ‘Flyer’ was returned from London to America in 1948, transforming as it travelled, as the British ambassador said at the time, “from invention to icon.”

In contrast to the Flyer, the success of the RFC’s 1917 drone, dubbed the Aerial Target, was recognized immediately and its remote-control system was adapted for use in the Royal Navy’s radio-operated Distance Control Boats. By 1918, these 40-foot-long, unmanned, explosive-filled craft, which were remotely operated from a ‘mother’ aircraft, had been successfully tested.

From the late 1800s futurists wrote about drones and even devised systems to remotely control airships, which prior to the Wright Brothers, were the prime focus of aerial development. Even after the first flight at Kittyhawk in 1903, engineers demonstrated model dirigibles that could be controlled from the ground using ‘Hertzian waves’ as radio was then called. The German inventor Anton Flettner raised patents for the radio control of aircraft in 1906, John Hays Hammond Jr. in the U.S. followed in 1914. Yet there is no evidence beyond rumour of any development projects along these lines being undertaken. So, before the First World War the idea for building a drone had been explored, but there was no significant market for airships or aircraft, let alone unmanned ones.

American drone development during the First World War was undertaken by Charles F. Kettering who developed his ‘Kettering Bug.’ A gyro-stabilized aerial torpedoes, it flew for a pre-determined distance like early cruise missiles before detonating. Similar work was conducted by the designers of the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane, a remote-controlled flying bomb that was first tested in September of 1917 and based on the Curtis Model N flying boat.

Kettering was also involved with the production of the DH-4 bomber. Some of the British military missions to the U.S. feature in this story along with the American enquiries into the First World War aircraft industry.

As a result of this 1917 drone project, work on remote-piloted vehicles continued and in 1935 the Queen Bee variant of de Havilland’s famous ‘Moth’ aircraft went into production.

British air defence gunnery honed its skills on a fleet of more than 400 of these aerial targets. Some of these were still being used as remote-controlled aircraft in the film industry well into the 1950s.

Like in Britain, American engineers converted a few aircraft to remote-control during the 1930s. A U.S. Navy admiral visiting the United Kingdom in early 1936 witnessed gunnery practice against a Queen Bee and on his return, the American programs, it is said, became known as “drones” in reference to the Anglo program’s anthophila-inspired name.

Despite the tremendous promise the technology offered, it would have little effect militarily for years, even decades. In fact, the greatest impact of Second World War-era drone technology would have on American history came when U.S. Navy lieutenant Joseph Kennedy Jr., son of the American politician and brother of the future U.S. president John F. Kennedy, was killed in an accident involving unmanned aircraft.

As part of the top-secret Operation Aphrodite, the 29-year-old Kennedy and another aviator were ordered to get an explosive-laden B-24 heavy bomber airborne before bailing out, after which the plane would be remotely piloted into a fortified German bunker in northern France. The aircraft exploded prematurely killing both men. It’s possible JFK would not have become president had his older brother Joe survived and entered politics himself.

Despite the setbacks, drone breakthroughs continued during the 1940s. During the early years of the decade, the Radioplane Company of Van Nuys, California pioneered the first mass-produced small drone aerial targets for the U.S. Army and Navy, known as the OQ-2. Interestingly, Norma Jeane Dougherty, later known as Marilyn Monroe, worked at the factory and was discovered during a propaganda film shoot of the company’s drones.

Radioplane was established by Reginald Denny, a successful British actor who achieved stardom in Hollywood’s silent film era, but returned home to fly with the RFC in the First World War. After the Armistice, he continued flying, joining an exclusive group of movie airmen.

The accepted story of Denny’s interest in drones stems from his interest in model aircraft. However, in The Dawn of the Drone a highly probable connection between Denny and the 1917 drone is revealed.

By the 1950s all sorts of unmanned aerial projects were underway. Radioplane was acquired by Northrop, the firm that now manufactures the Global Hawk, one of the most advanced jet-powered military drones.

Twenty years after his death in 1976, Archibald Montgomery Low was inducted into the New Mexico Museum of Space History’s ‘International Space Hall of Fame’ as “The Father of Radio Guidance Systems.”

The full story, illustrated throughout, is told in The Dawn of the Drone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Steve Mills is the author of The Dawn of the Drone. A former aviation engineer, he know is a writer and volunteer at Brooklands Museum in Surrey. Steve and his wife Gill have travelled extensively in their 46 years together and now live in Guildford in Surrey with their dog Jake.

(Originally published on Sept. 30, 2019)