Predator (3 page)

Soon after his work on the decoy, Karem decided to take a major gamble with his career. For most of his decade and a half as an aeronautical engineer, he had focused on the problems and possibilities of manned fighter planes and transports. But for the last couple of months, he had spent twenty hours a day thinking about what amounted to an aircraft with no pilot inside. There was nothing new about pilotless planes; inventors had designed them in a cornucopia of configurations since the First World War. By the 1970s, Jane's, the authoritative military publishing company, listed 120 separate types of pilotless planes in a
Robot Aircraft Today
pocket guide to what experts of the day usually called remotely piloted vehicles, or RPVs. Yet except for radio-controlled target drones, few unmanned aircraft had been adopted by the world's militaries, in large part due to poor reliability. As Karem knew, aircraft without pilots on board tended to crash a lot more than those with pilots inside them. But this decoy project had taken him down a novel mental path, and before long that path would lead him on a journey of discovery, a pioneering exploration of an aviation frontier.

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Only two months after finishing work on the decoy for the Israeli Air Force, Karem stunned his bosses and most of his coworkers at IAI by quitting his job as director of preliminary design. He left to start his own company, a move he had been mulling over since before the Yom Kippur War. After only three years at IAI, Karem had become deeply disillusioned with the way things were done at the massive aerospace company. All IAI's stock was held by the Israeli government, and in Karem's view government officials and many IAI executives treated the company more like a jobs program than a corporation. They hired far more people than necessary; the way Karem saw it, IAI's employees did less work in more time at higher cost to the taxpayers than was warranted. He believed in his bones that in most fields, especially aeronautics, the best work and the best ideas were produced not by large organizations—especially those influenced by politics—but by small teams of talented people working hand in hand toward common goals.

Karem's belief in teams stemmed from his youth, when Israel was still a vibrant work in progress, a magnet for Jewish idealists, and a dynamic dream coming true for Jews the world over. He fondly remembered how, in those days, younger members of the fresh and still fragile Jewish state teemed with plans and hopes for building a new society, a fundamentally good civilization, and a sanctuary for the Jewish people after centuries of persecution and a Holocaust whose extent was still being revealed. His high school home room teacher for four years, a tail gunner in a British bomber during World War II, preached that the Jews would survive and secure their freedom only if they lived one for all and all for one. The young counselor who advised Abe's chapter of the Aero Club stressed the importance of members helping one another with their designs. At IAI, Karem had been a rapidly rising star, but after proving several times that he could do major work faster and better with fewer people and save the taxpayers money at the same time, he found his efficiency rewarded mainly by resistance. One executive even reproached and threatened him for telling the Air Force that the modification of a particular fighter plane could be done in one year instead of the three IAI had estimated, saving two million out of the three million man-hours of labor the company was planning to commit to the project.

By January 1974, Karem was fed up, and after running the idea past friends in the Air Force he announced that he was leaving IAI in May to start his own company. After he invited a handful of his favorite engineers to come along, an IAI vice president called Karem into his office.

“Abe, we all love you,” the man said. “We owe you a lot. But we had a meeting about you forming your own company, and we decided we are going to crush you. So don't do it.”

“Why?” Karem asked. “You are seventeen thousand people, and I'm going to be what, five hundred?” At the time, Karem hoped to build a company that would be about that size.

Size didn't matter, the vice president said, but “every time we're going to propose something, they will say, ‘But Abe will do it faster and cheaper,' and we're not going to have that.”

As Karem later learned, the warning was friendly, but the threat wasn't idle.

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The clash between Karem's brash ways and the realities of IAI kindled his decision to leave the company, but something else was at work as well. The task of designing that radar-tricking glide decoy had led Karem to look at things in a new light. When he did, he had an epiphany.

The decoy he designed for IAI was primitive; in fact, it would have been less capable than the remote-control target drones used since the 1930s to train fighter pilots and antiaircraft units. But while thinking about the problem the decoy was meant to solve, Karem realized that an unmanned aircraft with the right capabilities could do far more than merely trick SAM batteries into revealing their locations. A remotely controlled drone armed with antitank missiles and designed to loiter in the sky for hours at a time could be one way to defeat—or, better yet, deter—another invasion of Israel.

Geography had forced Egypt's tanks to mass as they funneled through holes blasted in defensive embankments to cross the Suez Canal and enter the Sinai Peninsula. “Looking at that,” Karem recalled years later, “I said, if we are right on top of this high concentration of forces, you can throw some missiles at them. They will say, ‘This is not a good day,' and back off, and we are not killing that many people. You let them spread, they throw their armor against your armor, their air force against your air force, and all of a sudden you have thousands and tens of thousands of casualties.”

Pilots add weight to an aircraft, and more weight requires carrying more fuel; besides, pilots need to land every few hours to rest. But a fleet of pilotless aircraft such as Karem was imagining would have the persistence—the flight endurance—to provide an air-to-ground defensive missile system guarding Israel's borders day and night. Moreover, if the enemy shot one down, no pilot would be lost. Achieving the necessary flight endurance would be one of the hardest parts of his challenge, but Karem was sure he could design such a drone. For one thing, he believed himself not only the best engineer in aeronautics but probably the best engineer of any kind in all of Israel. Beyond that, he had been a model aircraft hobbyist since his teens, and as a modeler his specialty was a type of aircraft whose sole objective was endurance.

Thrown or towed into the air like a kite on a fifty-meter-long string and then released, free-flight gliders are the oldest form of model aircraft and among the trickiest to build. A schoolchild's paper airplane technically fits the definition, but in competitions the models are far larger—wingspans of six feet are common—and more sophisticated. Model gliders are built of lightweight material, such as balsa and tissue, and usually weigh a pound or less. The goal is to make a plane that is capable of staying airborne long after its launch or its release from the tow line, but without any remote or automated controls to help keep it aloft.

Like the materials used to build it, a tow-line glider's flight characteristics are the opposite of a jet fighter's. A model glider typically floats through the air at two or three miles an hour or less, gently circling until aerodynamic drag and the law of gravity return the aircraft to earth. In international competitions, the winning aircraft is the one that accumulates the most flight time over a series of launches within a strict limit of three to three and a half minutes per flight. The time limit and multiple rounds prevent winning or losing by the luck of the wind, though catching a thermal of the sort birds often ride is a favorite technique for success.

A good free-flight glider is rugged enough to withstand turbulence and return to stable flight or take a hard landing, yet light and aerodynamic enough to fly as close to three minutes as possible even in calm air. Most carry a dethermalizer, a device operated by a timer or activated by radio signal, which moves a control surface to put the plane into a “deep stall”—a sudden dive—and bring it to a gentle landing. Deep stall is used after a round's maximum flight time has been achieved, or to escape a thermal that threatens to carry the model away.

The best free-flight modelers employ all sorts of tricks and techniques to improve endurance, and Karem was a world-class free-flight modeler. Free-flight gliders were what Abe had learned to build in the Aero Club, and he pursued the hobby into adulthood. In August 1963, as a twenty-six-year-old Air Force officer, he placed tenth in his category representing Israel at the free-flight World Championships in Wiener Neustadt, Austria.

Two years later, Abe met Dina Schleiffer, a petite, lively, smart conscript who showed up one day in the Air Force engineering spaces, assigned to fulfill her obligatory two years of military service drafting technical drawings for engineers. Only eighteen, she was ten years younger than Abe, but he found her much more mature and confident than older girls he knew. They started dating, and soon Dina was traveling with Abe to free-flight competitions. She loved the little planes he designed, especially one he put together just as a spare and called his “ugly duckling.” She loved helping him launch his gliders when he competed. Most of all, Dina loved Abe, and in 1966 they married. For the rest of their lives, she would sometimes accuse him of tilting at windmills, but she always helped him in his work and backed him when he took major risks.

A month or two after leaving IAI, Karem set up a company of his own called Matos (Hebrew for “aircraft”) and began work on his idea for an armed drone to patrol Israel's borders. Friends in the Air Force counseled him to be less ambitious in his design; he should just make a reconnaissance drone with a TV camera that would send imagery to forward air controllers (officers on the ground who direct air strikes) rather than arm the RPV itself. The Air Force commander, Benny Peled, himself an aeronautical engineer, was even less encouraging. Peled told Karem that he wouldn't buy such a drone for the Air Force because its mission was fundamentally an Army job. Appalled, Karem pointed out that if he created a pilotless aircraft for the Army, it would have to be a helicopter, so that it could operate from wherever the Army was stationed. But a helicopter flies on a column of thrust created by rotors whose blades turn hundreds of revolutions per minute to keep the craft airborne, a fuel-thirsty and violent way to fly compared to airplanes. As Karem reminded Peled, helicopters shake like hell and have lousy endurance. Karem was also aware that others had taken on this challenge with unsatisfying results. In the late 1950s, the U.S. Navy built and deployed an unmanned helicopter to carry antisubmarine torpedoes; in the 1960s, the Navy added a TV camera and various weapons, and used the aircraft in Vietnam for reconnaissance and attacking enemy convoys moving at night. But in 1971 the Navy cancelled the program after half of the 810 unmanned helicopters that had been built crashed. Most of those that remained were used as target drones.

Unhappy with Peled's response, Karem told the Air Force commander that designing a drone helicopter for the mission he envisioned would be excruciatingly difficult.

“That's why you're Abe!” Peled cheerfully replied.

Karem came up with a preliminary design, but the Army declined to buy it. So Karem went back to his drawing board, as he would do nine times more over the next three years, without ever making a sale. He ultimately concluded that because of IAI's political influence, the Israeli military was never going to buy anything from his new company. Former colleagues confirmed that IAI was indeed out to kill his company; his friends, meanwhile, told him he might as well go to the United States. If he did, no one could accuse him of betraying Israel by leaving—not after all he'd done for the country.

Deeply frustrated, Karem decided that emigrate was what he would do. He would take his talents to the United States, where opportunities for entrepreneurs were far greater and the aerospace industry far larger. Dina and Abe's three brothers—Jacob, Isaac, and Joseph—all supported his decision.

Karem quickly decided that he and Dina should live in the Los Angeles Basin. With some of the finest flying weather in the United States, the area was home to aviation companies large and small, multitudes of engineers, skilled technicians, and subcontractors galore. An inventor could find just about any kind of help or parts he needed in order to design and build aircraft there, and Karem already had contacts in the area.

Which was why, one sunny Sunday in 1978, he and Dina were driving around the L.A. suburbs looking for a house to buy. As they considered and rejected one house after another, it quickly became clear that their priorities were very different. Finally Dina put her finger on the problem.

“I'm looking for a house with a garage attached. You're looking for a garage with a house attached,” she teased.

They laughed, but Abe knew she was right. Dina cared about buying a house that would suit their needs, but Abe wanted a roomy garage that would serve as a laboratory where he could do his research and development.

In the end Abe found a garage he liked, and it happened to be attached to the front of a Spanish-style house Dina liked, on a tall, pleasant hill in Hacienda Heights, an affluent suburb east of the city. Built to hold three cars, the garage had six hundred square feet of floor space and an equally spacious attic. Before long, both would be crammed with tools; raw materials; handmade molds to fabricate small wings and other aircraft parts from plywood, urethane foam, and fiberglass; and a four-by-eight-foot granite-topped table flat and true enough to serve as an assembly bench. Karem liked to remind himself that Orville and Wilbur Wright had invented their first aircraft in a bicycle shop. Why couldn't a garage become part of aviation history, too?