Few would call the Predator a design classic, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers):
It is more a technological kludge of different components tacked together, with an engine derived from a snowmobile at the back, an outsize satellite communications pod stuck on top, and missiles so heavy it can barely carry them slung underneath. According to one estimate, it takes seventeen people just to fly this “unmanned” aircraft. And yet the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator has been immeasurably more successful than any previous drone.
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DARPA, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, identified the need for a long-endurance drone and had carried out a classified study under the codename Teal Rain in the 1970s. This led to the construction of an aircraft called Amber with a wooden propeller and a distinctive upside-down-V tail.
Amber was designed by Abraham Karem, an expert on gliders and other soaring aircraft.
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Leading Systems’ most important asset was a cheap export version of the Amber called the GNAT-750. The Turkish government had expressed an interest in the GNAT-750, a larger version of Amber, with a wingspan of thirty-six feet and an empty weight of five hundred pounds. Being an export model, it had less expensive electronics. The engine was a German Rotax 914 used in sailplanes and light aircraft (a smaller version is used in snowmobiles).
The GNAT-750 flew at barely a hundred miles an hour, but resembling a glider it required minimal power to stay in the air. A flight endurance of around forty-eight hours meant the GNAT-750 could maintain constant watch over a given area for longer than any manned aircraft.
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When the 1993 conflict in Bosnia flared up, the US had no suitable reconnaissance drones on hand. Satellites were unable to see beneath the cloud cover. Existing spy planes were designed to operate in hostile skies, flying at extreme altitude like the U-2 or at extreme speed like the Mach-3 SR-71 Blackbird. The requirement was for a drone that could fly at low speed and low altitude, carry an off-the-shelf camera system, and beam back real-time video via a relay aircraft.
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The GNAT-750 looked like the ideal solution. It provided a stable platform with long endurance and, because it was “export technology,” there was nothing sensitive that would cause problems if one was shot down and the remains analyzed.
All the GNAT-750 needed was the communications link to a relay aircraft.
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One of the modifications overseen by the CIA was a security feature that shut down everything if the speed dropped too low, as it was assumed the aircraft must be on the ground. A gust of wind from behind caused the flight speed indicator to drop below the vital figure. The GNAT-750 duly switched itself off and dropped like a stone.
That sort of accident could kill a manned program along with the pilot, but the loss of a drone is not such a serious matter.
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The CIA operated the GNAT-750 from Albania, flying missions to Bosnia with considerable success. Video was sent back via the manned relay aircraft — like the earlier TDR-1, DASH, and Firebee, radio range was the limitation — and missions only lasted as long as the relay plane was in place.
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The resolution on the ground was eighteen inches — as good as many satellites, with the advantage that it could be sent when and where needed, whereas satellites only appear every ninety minutes as their orbit allows.
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The drone turned out to be stealthy, not from design but because it was largely made of composite material and there was not much metal to give a radar return.
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The Pentagon was not content to let the CIA have a monopoly on drones. As it was apparent that there might be further limited conflicts where such drones could be useful, they funded their own development of the GNAT-750. This was an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration or ACTD for a version known as the 750-45 or 750-TE Predator. The Predator name was chosen after a competition among General Atomics employees.
The result was a larger aircraft; the empty weight almost doubled to a thousand pounds. It could stay in position five hundred miles from its base for twenty-four hours. Most important, it had extra communication equipment, including a large and unwieldy but effective Ku-band satellite communications setup with a gimbaled antenna that swivels around under its cover to keep pointing at a satellite. Sudden maneuvers tended to break the link and contact could be lost for a minute; the autopilot kicked in while the drone found its satellite again. While it was not be entirely reliable, armed with this capability, the new drone could beam back video from anywhere in the world without a relay plane. And it could fly anywhere, watching for as long as fuel lasted. It entered service in 1995 as the RQ-1 Predator.
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At ten thousand feet it was inaudible, and rarely noticed by those on the ground unless they actually craned their head back to look at it. Skilled operators learned to use the cover of the sun to shield their aircraft from those they were watching.
In former Yugoslavia the Predator was of little use in directing air strikes due to a lack of training and poor communication between different units. One officer complained it took about forty-five minutes to get a strike aircraft into the same area as the drone, while the drone operators sometimes provided poor descriptions of the target — “the house with orange tiles” was not enough in a village with twenty of them. This experience prompted the addition of a laser illuminator to the Predator so the operator could highlight an aim point by shining the laser light on it, “sparkling” it, in in Air Force slang.
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In a later addition, originally known as Wartime Integrated Laser Designator (WILD), Predators were fitted with lasers to mark targets so laser-guided weapons could home in on them — “lasing” rather than just “sparkling.”
Abraham Karem was an Assyrian Jew born in Baghdad. Family had to move to Israel when he was a teenager, built his first drone for them in the Yom Kippur war, then immigrated to the US four years later and started a drone business, building them in his garage, and in a decade his Amber was the best in the world. There is a long history of countries being indifferent to forcing out their human capital reserves and of the US being the passive beneficiary.
Hambling has a bit more to say about Karem:
The difference between a “drone” and a “remote control aircraft” is price, ownership, and use case. The hobby r/c industry existed well before modern drones.
McChuck, Joe Kennedy Jr. died 80 years ago in WWII in a premature explosion in a “remote control aircraft” that was also literally an “FPV kamikaze drone” which being an actual normal aircraft was large enough to use the muscles of human beings instead of solenoids. The humans were supposed to bail out prior to final attack.
Obviously all those aviation engineers knew plenty about RC aircraft for a long time, but they weren’t making good drones yet because there were a variety of challenges which had to be overcome and integrated successfully into one platform. Low power-to-weight ratios (and some stealth) with carbon fiber, energy-efficient long-range telecommunications, accurate geo-positioning (IIRC this came later), integrated optics (with its own comms), and a much more robust automatic stability system. It’s easy from the perspective of 2024 to lose sight of how hard that might have been to achieve in a small package and at self-justifying prices over 40 years ago.
On June 7th, 1944, my stepfather’s LST was showered with shrapnel from the adjacent ship. It was destroyed on the beach by a German remote controlled plane/bomb.
Yes, Lt Joseph Kennedy Junior was killed when a “robot” PB4Y-1 bomber blew up prematurely in 1944. This left his younger brother John F Kennedy as the family heir.