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.

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