UAV HISTORY
Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles (UAV's) are becoming more and
more important to not only the U.S. Armed
Forces, but to the general public as well.
However, the idea of the first UAV started
almost a century ago during World War I in the
United States. The United States wanted to
create something similar to their naval torpedo.
What the United States set out to do nearly a
century ago evolved into an unprecedented number
of UAV's that can be created by anyone
now-a-days.
According to
Phineas T. Sleeper, "In 1916 - 17 a prototype
called the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane made
a number of short test flights providing that
the idea was sound." Showing that the idea of a
UAV was possible and could be accomplished. The
U.S. Army; after seeing what was possible,
decided to throw their hat into the ring and let
Lieutenant Colonel Bion J. Arnold lead it. Less
than a decade after the project had begun, it
was ended though in 1925.
Luckily enough,
the idea of an UAV or what can sometimes be
referred to as a drone, was not given up on.
According to Phineas T. Sleeper, "In 1936 the
Navy began another drone program which was
intended to provide realistic targets for
antiaircraft gunnery practice but which directly
influenced missile development." A Lieutenant
Commander (and later Rear Admiral) D.S. Fahrney
was put in charge of this project. The aircraft
Fahrney decided to use was a Sterman-Hammond
JH-1. This drone was able to find success during
1937 and was fully tested during the summer of
1938 for target practice. With this success
Fahrney suggested the idea of creating attack
drones.
With Fahrney's
suggestion, the United States set out to convert
a TG-2 (torpedo plane) and a BG-1 (dive bomber)
into missiles. This worked out well for the
United States as they continued to find success
over and over again for a very long time.
The problem
though, was that these devices were no more then
remote controlled airplanes. This would change
before the 1960's when the U.S. Air Force felt
it was losing too many pilots and wanted to
start up a UAV program. They did exactly that
after the events involving Francis Gary Powers
and his "secret" U-2 mission that did not go
well. According to wikipedia, "Within days, the
highly classified UAV program was launched under
the code name of 'Red Wagon'." The first action
that these UAV's would see would be during the
Vietnam War. After this other countries began
developing different kinds of UAV's to help
themselves with different objectives.
Since then UAV's
have evolved continuously and are not done
evolving. Just recently the FAA decided to bring
a UAV program to the University of Alaska
Fairbanks and the U.S. Navy has given support to
the program by providing approximately 47
million dollars worth of funding to the project.
They have also helped to save soldiers lives in
foreign countries and are believed to be a huge
part of the wars that the United States has had
to fight over the past few years. Time will tell
if this will continue.