UAV History

Target drone evolution

In the post-World War II period, Radioplane followed up the success of the OQ-2 target drone with another very successful series of piston-powered target drones, what would become known as the Basic Training Target (BTT) family (the BTT designation wasn't created until the 1980s, but is used here as a convenient way to resolve the tangle of designations), including the OQ-19/KD2R Quail, the MQM-33/MQM-36 Shelduck and the MQM-57 Falconer. The BTTs remained in service for the rest of the 20th century.

The US military acquired a number of other drones similar in many ways to the Radioplane drones. The Globe company built a series of targets, beginning with the piston-powered "KDG Snipe" of 1946, which evolved through the "KD2G" and "KD5G" pulsejet-powered targets and the "KD3G" and "KD4G" piston-powered targets, to the "KD6G" series of piston powered targets. The KD6G series appears to have been the only one of the Globe targets to be built in substantial numbers. It was similar in size and configuration to the BTT series, but had a twin-fin tail. It was redesignated "MQM-40" in the early 1960s, by which time it was generally out of service.

The use of drones as decoys goes back at least to the 1950s, with the Northrop Crossbow tested in such a role. The first operational decoy drone was the McDonnell Douglas "ADM-20 Quail", which was carried by Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers to help them penetrate defended airspace.

By the late 1950s combat aircraft were capable of Mach 2, and so faster targets had to be developed to keep pace. Northrop designed a turbojet-powered Mach 2 target in the late 1950s, originally designated the Q-4 but later given the designation of AQM-35. In production form, it was a slender dart with wedge-shaped stubby wings, swept conventional tail assembly, and a GE J85 turbojet engine, like that used on the Northrop F-5 fighter.

Reconnaissance platforms

In the late 1950s, along with the Falconer, the US Army acquired another reconnaissance drone, the Aerojet-General "MQM-58 Overseer". It had a similar configuration to the Falconer, but featured a vee tail and was about twice as heavy. It does not appear to have been built in large quantities, and may have never been much more than an experimental platform to evaluate more sophisticated reconnaissance sensors than could be carried by the Falconer.

The success of drones as targets led to their use for other missions. The well-proven Ryan Firebee was a good platform for such experiments, and tests to evaluate it for the reconnaissance mission proved highly successful. A series of reconnaissance drones derived from the Firebee, the Ryan Model 147 Lightning Bug series, were used by the US to spy on Vietnam, China, and North Korea in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The Lightning Bugs were not the only long-range reconnaissance drones developed in the 1960s. The US developed other, more specialized reconnaissance drones: the Ryan "Model 154", the Ryan and Boeing "Compass Copes", and the Lockheed "D-21", all of which were more or less cloaked in secrecy.

This article contains material that originally came from the web article Unmanned Aerial Vehicles by Greg Goebel, which exists in the Public Domain.