Fogleman decided the Air Force was the rightful home of the Predator, since it was an aircraft that flew from and landed on runways. The Predator was initially a joint program managed by the Navy, with the Army chosen to fly the drone, at times using Air Force pilots. Whittle: The iconoclasts who saw promise in the Predator in its early days included the Air Force chief of staff at the time, General Ronald Fogleman, who had flown fighter aircraft in dangerous reconnaissance missions during the Vietnam War with a unit called the Misty Fast FACs (Forward air controllers, fliers who helped direct fire so it wouldn't hit friendly troops). It sounds like eventually, there was a turf battle over the Predator between the military services. Much the same thing happened with the Predator. Over time, a few innovators devised refinements - new software, new hardware, new communications architectures - that transformed the personal computer from a novelty into a necessity.
#Uav drone predator how to
In the beginning, like the first personal computers, the Predator was a new technology some people found interesting but most weren't sure how to exploit.
They include a former Israeli aeronautical engineer who turned his Los Angeles garage into a drone laboratory, two daring entrepreneur brothers who bought his ideas when he couldn't sell them to the military, a couple of fighter pilots who saw the potential of planes with no pilots and forced them on the Air Force, a Pentagon operator named Snake, and others. Whittle: The Predator was invented and transformed into a world-changing technology by a cast of characters no novelist could conjure up - iconoclasts, for the most part, who had vision. It wasn't created by the military-industrial complex, was it? In summary, how did it come to be? This weapon has a very unusual origin story. The new capabilities the Predator offered changed the way military people thought about unmanned aircraft, resulting in a drone revolution that has changed the way we wage war, altered the military, altered the CIA, reshaped the defense and aviation industries and is spreading in the civilian world faster than the Federal Aviation Administration can govern it. The Predator's phenomenal flight endurance also made it a powerful new form of overhead intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance - a drone that can find and shine a laser beam on targets for manned aircraft, eavesdrop on enemy communications, provide troops on the ground warning of enemy movements and give commanders an overhead view of the battlefield.īefore the Predator, drones were at best a niche technology, unreliable and largely unconnected to anyone other than their operators. Richard Whittle: In 2001, the Predator became the first weapon in history whose operators could use it to stalk and kill a single individual on the other side of the planet much the way a sniper does, and with total invulnerability.
Q: Air & Space Magazine said the Predator was one of 10 aircraft that changed the world.
Now Whittle has published the first comprehensive book on the history of the Predator and the "secret origins of the drone revolution." Earlier this week, he shared his thoughts on the program with CNET. "I'm not sure," Whittle told his agent, who'd asked about his plans, "but these unmanned aerial vehicles look interesting." After writing a book on the V-22 Osprey, a tilt-rotor military aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter, longtime Pentagon correspondent Richard Whittle found himself wondering what to write about next.
0 kommentar(er)
