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jamescookenotthatone OP t1_je4jj14 wrote

I was listening to an episode of the radio drama X Minus One from 1956 when a character says they are going to send out drones and was startled to hear a reference to what I thought was a recent word. I first assumed they just lucked into it but nope, 'drone' dates back to 1936.

Link to the radio drama:

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly94bW9uZS5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw/episode/YWY1MmFlOThjZGJjNGM5MWIxMjY2ZTVlOTY5YTIxYTQ?ep=14

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JetScootr t1_je4jyyu wrote

My father was in the Navy during WWII, and was stationed on an aircraft carrier. His job was maintaining the drones that the gunners used for target practice.

When the kamakazi attacks started, the Navy ordered the drone pilots to fly the drones into the ship if the gunners didn't shoot them down. The aircraft carrier's command crew was not happy about these orders, but it was from Washington, so they had to.

I've had a hard time the last ten years or so even convincing people that radio controlled drones were even a thing that far back. Thanks for finding this link.

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BCF13 t1_je4kdrh wrote

War always drives new technologies.

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Squirrel851 t1_je4krss wrote

Check out the Pigeon Bomb. Weird shit back in that day.

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jaa101 t1_je4ljjc wrote

Replying to JetScootr (#2,443,986)

Another amazing technology that helped beat the kamakazi attacks was the proximity fuse. Without that, you have to set your AA shells to explode at some fixed time from firing which is hard to get right against incoming aircraft. Proximity-fused shells would automatically explode when they got near something—a huge advantage—but it involved having vacuum tubes survive being fired from a gun.

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fatuous_sobriquet t1_je4u2gy wrote

> The first pilotless aircraft were built during World War I.

They didn’t fly them into buildings until much later, though

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GreenStrong t1_je52tdx wrote

JFK's older brother died flying one of these drones. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. spent most of the war piloting a sub- hunting aircraft over the North Atlantic. It was a dangerous job, but he never spotted an actual enemy. He volunteered for one last mission, they needed a pilot to get an experimental radio controlled plane off the ground, then bail out with a parachute while the plane flew on. The primitive vacuum tube based TV equipment overheated, and the plane blew up.

Their father was a prominent senator, and Joseph would have probably been the one to run for president, had he not exploded. Worth noting that for that generation, it was expected that a senator's two Harvard educated sons should both see combat. JFK was captain of a small PT boat that was sunk in battle. George H. Bush was another senator's son who nearly died in combat- he flew a plane that got shot down.

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Jampine t1_je566o4 wrote

Replying to Sindri556 (#2,444,286)

Made me think of the incorrect summary of Project wingman: "When defending the boat, we make the discovery that in this universe, missles are pigeon guided, and exhibit traits of self perseverance".

Checked it again, and it literally has the same picture from the Wikipedia entry lol.

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series_hybrid t1_je59mzq wrote

In bee society, drones follow the queen when she is flying through the air.

Anti-aircraft training started out with a piloted airplane pulling a banner far behind it, but problems still occurred.

Simple radio-controls could operate servo's on a target plane, so...a control plane with a pilot and one crewman would take off. A target plane with a pilot would take off just behind them.

Just beore reaching the target area, the pilot in the target plane would parachute out.

Since the plane in the rear followed the control plane, unmanned target-planes became known as drones.

I read that on vectorsite

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KNHaw t1_je5c9ch wrote

In 1990 I was a fresh college graduate working at Northrop (now Northrop-Grumman) on the B2 bomber when Desert Storm started. There were several engineers who I worked with who suddenly disappeared. When I asked where they had gone, I was told not to ask.

It turns out they'd all worked on a target drone as described above. On the first night of the air war, the Iraqi air defenses detected hundreds of attacking targets and shot them down. But in doing so, they'd turned on their radars, which had been detected by ECM aircraft that had blown them up to pave the way for the real wave of air strikes.

That first wave was training drones, designed to be shot down, originally for training but here as a feint tactic. All those engineers who'd gone missing were in Saudi Arabia supporting this because they'd all previously worked on these crappy, low end target drones Northrop had made as a sideline.

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Nutcrackit t1_je5jg47 wrote

Okay I swear this shit is proving time travel Fing with the timeline. As someone who has a large interest in the historic warfare I don't see how I couldn't have heard of this.

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jb270 t1_je5k3bi wrote

Replying to GreenStrong (#2,447,815)

The craziest part with Bush senior is that he drifted away from the rest of the plane crew. He wound up being the only survivor, the other 8 airmen were captured by the Japanese, tortured, executed, and parts of them were served to Japanese officers. It’s known as the Chichijima incident, and is the subject of the book Flyboys. The entire trajectory of the 20th and 21st century would have been completely different if an ocean current hadn’t saved George HW Bush from getting beheaded and cannibalized.

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JetScootr t1_je5r6tg wrote

Replying to KNHaw (#2,449,688)

That's what Wild Weasels (piloted F4 phantoms) did in Viet Nam - they'd go in first to get the enemy to turn on their radars, which they would then shoot up with radar-seeking missiles.

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DragonWhsiperer t1_je5roi2 wrote

Replying to nomnomnomnomRABIES (#2,452,441)

Dunno but i don't think so. SEAD and DEAD are anti radar warfare concepts going back to the war in Vietnam. Wild Weasel squadrons were especially trained pilots that would fly as a lures into enemy SAM range to trigger their radar, and have their buddy that was silent fire special anti radar missiles.

Basically the same practice, just replacing the human pilot with a remotely operated craft.

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neoplastic_pleonasm t1_je5vzrg wrote

Replying to JetScootr (#2,443,986)

When I was a little kid, my grandfather, an air force mechanic, gave me a weird little model airplane for Christmas. It was black and pointy and had no cockpit. It wasn't until many years later I learned it was a real plane, a Lockheed D-21 hypersonic supersonic drone, and he'd worked on the project. It absolutely blew my mind that we had hypersonic supersonic drones in the late 60s.

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KNHaw t1_je5xoee wrote

Replying to nomnomnomnomRABIES (#2,452,441)

No worries. Not classified at all. Gen Schwartzkopf gave one of his famous news conferences about it. "You know how the Iraqi government claimed they shot down a hundred planes yesterday? Well, let me explain why they think that..."

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JetScootr t1_je657gw wrote

Replying to buntopolis (#2,453,433)

Dad said they weren't allowed to talk about it then, but when he was telling me, it was because my brother had a RC model plane that Dad said was about the same level of tech - in a model plane a little bigger than a notebook. Dad didn't figure that the stuff he worked on was secret anymore :)

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ScottRiqui t1_je65jk7 wrote

The modern quadcopter drone dates back to a 1959 patent application.

The biggest difference is obviously that the new drones are battery powered rather than gas-powered, but the big characteristics (four rotors at the ends of folding arms, avoiding interference between rotors, maneuvering by varying the rotor tilt, etc.) were there almost 65 years ago.

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FiveFive55 t1_je65r7m wrote

Replying to neoplastic_pleonasm (#2,453,676)

When I read this the first time I thought that your dad gave you an actual, decommissioned drone and just told you it was a model. Had to look up how large it was to be certain that wasn't the case. At 43' long I'm assuming it was not a real drone, unless you had an exceptionally large bedroom to put it inside.

It's kind of wild how our perspective on a word can change. 20 years ago if someone mentioned drones people would picture a giant military drone ready to drop bombs. Now you say it and pictures of tiny little toy-sized quadcopters pop into most people's minds.

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ThePeriodicPooper t1_je69xqo wrote

kinda sad that our greatest technological achievements pretty much always come into existence as a result of war.

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buntopolis t1_je6d1eq wrote

Replying to JetScootr (#2,455,511)

Haha that’s awesome. Such a cool thing to learn about your parent. I didn’t learn much because my grandpa really didn’t like to talk about the war. He only really opened up about it after his cancer diagnosis. That’s when he told me his plane was shot down by Zeroes on patrol, the aircraft sheared in half before hitting the water - only he and the pilot survived. Floated there for over 24 hours until rescue came. Like, holy shit. Really puts my own problems into perspective there.

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Ty3point141 t1_je6eu6a wrote

My grandpa was in the Navy in Vietnam. He flew QH-50 Drone helicopters. Traditionally they were supposed to be anti-submarine, however, they felt they had better use taking those torpedoes and dropping them on enemy positions on land.

He said they had a high failure rate and that they would have to go and retrieve the downed helicopters.

QH-50

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pixelwhistle t1_je6fhga wrote

“Here’s that torpedo you ordered.” “Thank you, such quick service”

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eastindyguy t1_je6m6ea wrote

I believe the National Museum of the USAF has a replica of one of these drones in the hangar dedicated to the early years of flight. Anyone interested in aviation or just likes looking at a bunch of cool aircraft really should visit the museum.

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hucareshokiesrul t1_je6n7rz wrote

Why have drones so recently become such a big thing? An RC helicopter doesn’t seem like a particularly new technology.

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ambulancisto t1_je6w6q7 wrote

Replying to JetScootr (#2,443,986)

What's amazing is that there were drones that could be piloted with TV. TV was in its infancy. I know the Germans had some TV guided missiles, but talk about bleeding edge tech for the early 1940s...

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duglarri t1_je7a7d2 wrote

There was the US Navy program in the Pacific in 1943 that resulted in video-guided kamikaze drones that may have actually been the inspiration for the real kamikazes. The Japanese didn't start deploying Kamikazes until very late 1944- prior to that, though, the would have seen American "planes" diving and crashing into Japanese targets in the Pacific, part of trials of some very effective drones by the Navy.

The drones actually worked very well, with success rates of around 25%, compared to bombing hit rates of 2% for conventional attacks. And the drone attacks were risk-free for the crews, because they stayed kilometers away from the targets. Zero casualties in all the test missions they flew.

But the Navy brass in their infinite wisdom killed the project because they felt they had enough conventional aircraft available to do the job, and losing five or ten aircrew on any particular target was perfectly fine as far as they were concerned.

So American drones may have been the inspiration for the Kamikaze.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/drone-strike-180964753/

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VoopityScoop t1_je8bvtu wrote

Replying to Sindri556 (#2,444,286)

In the Pacific Theater of WWII there was a plan to capture a bunch of bats that were living in attics in Tokyo and attach incendiary devices to them, so when the bats returned to their attacks they would set them on fire and burn Tokyo to the ground. The only reason this plan didn't go through was because we decided to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead

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That-Soup3492 t1_je8my0g wrote

My grandfather worked with radio controlled drones for gunnery practice in the army during the 50s. I still have a propeller from one that he was given when he left.

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