Predator (47 page)

Scott Swanson worked for Big Safari on Predator projects for another two years after he left the Trailer Park. Perhaps the most exciting initiative after all those undertaken for the CIA was an experiment in which Big Safari put Stinger antiaircraft missiles, which are normally shoulder-fired, on a Predator in late 2002. The modification was an attempt to stop supersonic Iraqi MiG fighters that were hunting the drones as they flew surveillance of no-fly zones over Iraq. After several inconclusive engagements with Iraqi fighter planes over the no-fly zones, an Air Combat Command crew, with Swanson instructing them, lost in an exchange of missiles with an Iraqi MiG-25 Foxbat on December 23, 2002, the Predator's last air-to-air engagement. Two years after that, Swanson left Big Safari for another green door assignment, and in 2007 he retired from the Air Force.

By then, Guay was gone. The Big Safari sensor operator died of diabetes and liver damage on September 3, 2005, at age forty-five, in Hampton, Virginia, where he had moved after retiring from the Air Force on May 31. Wry to the end, Guay told his younger brother, Scott, that he was moving back to a suburban house he had bought years earlier, while stationed at Langley Air Force Base, to “be a gentleman farmer.” The backyard had room for a small vegetable garden at best.

Guay's service record included a Bronze Star and nine oak leaf clusters for his work on the Predator. During the WILD Predator project, Guay had been the first sensor operator to lase targets for fighter aircraft from the drone. During the Summer Project, Guay had been at the controls of the Predator's cameras when they spotted Osama bin Laden. During the first night of the war in Afghanistan, he had aimed the laser designator in the armed Predator's first lethal strike near Kandahar. And at Roberts Ridge, he had used the Predator's laser illuminator to help the rescue helicopters land safely to pick up the stranded Rangers. At Big Safari's offices in San Diego, his friends dedicated a wall in a conference room to Guay, hanging his Bronze Star, framed under glass with its citation, next to another frame holding his many other ribbons.

*   *   *

On the evening of April 23, 2008, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum held an opening ceremony for a new Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles exhibit. Installed at the west end of the museum's massive building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the display included six unmanned aircraft. Hung from the ceiling, they represented all four branches of the military. Included were the Navy's Pioneer and two other small tactical UAVs: the Army's Shadow 200 and the Marine Corps' Dragon Eye, a hand-launched drone small enough to fold up and carry in a backpack. Looming above those were three far larger aircraft. Two were experiments that had led short lives: DARPA's DarkStar, which was cancelled in 1999 after only seven flights by two prototypes, one of which crashed; and the X-45A, a technology demonstrator built by Boeing and Lockheed Martin for a joint program that included DARPA, the Air Force, and the Navy, and flew only in tests, which ended in 2005. The centerpiece of the exhibit—paid for by a donation from General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.—was Predator 3034, slung from the ceiling at a slight banking angle, the better to display its Hellfire missiles. Also visible on its side was Big Safari's distinctive crossed spears and shield.

Those in the audience at the exhibition opening, which was followed by an open bar and elegant buffet dinner at the museum, included General John Jumper, Snake Clark, Spoon Mattoon, Ed Boyle, Mark Cooter, and Frank Pace, the software engineer Abe Karem had hired in the 1980s. Karem wasn't among the guests. But he would often proudly note to those who asked how he felt about the Predator's success that nearly every key department at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems was now run by one of the core group of engineers who joined Neal and Linden Blue's company with Karem after his own company, Leading Systems, went bankrupt. In 2010, Pace would succeed Tom Cassidy as president of the UAV affiliate of General Atomics.

Cassidy—the executive whose savvy on Capitol Hill had been so important to the development of the Predator, the Reaper, and other derivatives built by General Atomics—spoke at the UAV exhibit dedication. The keynote address, however, was delivered by the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, Lieutenant General David Deptula, who told his audience that it would be “difficult to overstate the growing role and importance of unmanned aircraft systems.” Deptula said the exhibit was a testament to that role, but he added that the word
unmanned
tended to disguise the fact that “while no one physically sits in these aircraft … there are still men and women, U.S. combat veterans, skillfully and successfully piloting these aircraft.”

Looking out over an audience that included members of the Air Force team that had flown Predator 3034 in Afghanistan back in 2001 and 2002, as well as others from Big Safari, General Atomics, Raytheon, L-3, and the CIA, Deptula thanked them for their work. Then he noted that Predator 3034 “brings with it a storied past and a distinguished history of combat service to our country.” He added:

This Predator was the first to test-fire the Hellfire—the brainchild of General John Jumper; it was the first U.S. aircraft over Afghanistan deploying on September 12th, 2001, courtesy of the efforts of Colonel Snake Clark; it was the first Predator to shoot a Hellfire in combat—as I witnessed on October 7, 2001, as the commander of the air operations center for Afghanistan, wondering just who issued the fire order, rapidly picking up the phone and asking Colonel Eddie Boyle 7,000 miles away if he knew—and the rest of the story I'll save for later.

By the time Predator 3034 was retired by the Air Force and shipped to the museum, the aircraft had flown 2,780 hours—2,338 of them over Afghanistan—at the hands of perhaps a dozen or more pilots. Snake Clark called 3034 the “Elvis of Predators.” In his speech, Deptula called it “truly a piece of aviation history.” Indeed it is, for like the
Spirit of St. Louis
and a couple of the other planes hanging from the museum's ceiling, this peculiar aircraft with its slender wings and bulging nose and upside-down tail did something extraordinary. It changed the world.

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The task of a narrative history is not to collect every fact on a subject but to find what in biography have been called the “fertile facts”—the facts that reveal character or, in a narrative history, the character of the story. This is a roundabout way of explaining why some facts that would be included if this were an academic history of the Predator are absent from this book. Expert readers may be surprised, for example, to find no discussion of the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office, a Pentagon entity that oversaw UAV programs from 1993 until its death in 1998. The reason for the omission is simple: while DARO was important bureaucratically, providing money to or withholding it from the Predator program each year it existed, it played no substantive role in developing or employing the aircraft.

Some may also wonder why the Predator's mission-type-series designations—RQ-1 and MQ-1—are mentioned only in this book's final chapter, while designations of some other aircraft are omitted altogether. Like DARO's role these are not fertile facts, though in cases of aircraft better known by their designations, such as F-15E and F-16, I have identified them that way.

Some readers may also find it annoying that this book unabashedly embraces the term
drone
to describe what many experts and advocates prefer to call
unmanned aerial vehicles
,
remotely piloted aircraft
, or
unmanned aircraft systems
, among other clunky constructions. Some argue that the only unmanned aircraft that can properly be called drones are those that are mere targets; others worry that in recent years, the word
drone
has taken on the connotation
robot killer aircraft
. In 2013, the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International even made the password for Wi-Fi service in the media center of its annual conference “Don't say drones,” an amusing but futile attempt to dissuade reporters from using the term. As I have written before—and said to AUVSI's genial and energetic leader, Michael Toscano—those in the drone business need to recognize that they long ago lost this debate and make the best of it. The word
drone
is not only handy, it is an easy and even elegant way to describe any aircraft with no pilot inside. In any event, it is here to stay, for by definition, revolutions change things—including definitions.

 

NOTES

Please note that some of the links referenced in this work may no longer be active.

 

The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

1: THE GENIUS OF THE GENESIS

From the time
: The account of Karem's childhood is based on author interviews with Abraham Karem and Dina Karem.

as part of an exodus
: Reeva Spector Simon, Michael Menachem Laskier, and Sara Reguer, eds.,
The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 348.

socialist attitudes of collectivism
: Orit Rozin,
The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel: A Challenge to Collectivism
(Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2011), pp. xiii–xvi.

three times won
: Abraham E. Karem career summary provided by Karem Aircraft Inc.

he could get the Air Force commander
: Author interview with Shmuel Arbel, March 8, 2013.

by the unorthodox means
: Shlomo Aloni,
Israeli A-4 Skyhawk Units in Combat
(New York: Osprey Publishing, 2009). An account of Dotan shooting down two MiG-17s on one mission can be found on the Israeli Air Force website,
http://www.iaf.org.il/2540-30115-en/IAF.aspx
, accessed March 11, 2013. Karem supplied the detail that the antitank rockets were Zunis.

had cost Israel
: Lon O. Nordeen,
Air Warfare in the Missile Age
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), pp. 123–48.

The SAMs had also inflicted
: Robert S. Bolia, “Overreliance on Technology in Warfare: The Yom Kippur War as a Case Study,”
Parameters, the U.S. Army's Senior Professional Journal
, U.S. Army War College (Summer 2004): 46–56.

nearly three times the speed of sound
: “Israeli Aircraft, Arab SAMS in Key Battle,”
Aviation Week & Space Technology
, October 22, 1973, p. 14. According to
Aviation Week
, the Soviet-supplied SA-6 “Gainful” antiaircraft missile, used in combat for the first time during the Yom Kippur War, reached a speed of Mach 2.98.

used since the 1930s
: Laurence R. Newcome,
Unmanned Aviation: A Brief History of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(Reston, Va.: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004), pp. 57–58.

the winning aircraft is the one
: Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Sporting Code, Technical Regulations for Free Flight Contests, 2013, p. 9,
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=F%C3%A9d%C3%A9ration+A%C3%A9ronautique+Internationale+Sporting+Code%2C+Technical+Regulations+for+Free+Flight+Contests%2C+2013&gbv=2&oq=F%C3%A9d%C3%A9ration+A%C3%A9ronautique+Internationale+Sporting+Code%2C+Technical+Regulations+for+Free+Flight+Contests%2C+2013&gs_l=heirloom-hp.3 ... 2262.2262.0.3822.1.1.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0.... 0 ... 1ac..34.heirloom-hp..1.0.0.b0xGxN5Jl3M&rlz=1W1TSND_enUS413
.

he placed tenth
: “A/2 Glider Results, World Championships for Free Flight Models,”
Aero Modeler
, October 1963, p. 510.

cancelled the program after half
: The drone helicopter built by the U.S. Navy was the QH-50 DASH, an acronym for Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter. Details can be found in Newcome,
Unmanned Aviation
, pp. 86–88.

cancelled the project
: Newcome,
Unmanned Aviation
, pp. 23–30.

Marilyn Monroe
: Ibid., p. 58;
http://www.northrop grumman.com/Capabilities/BQM74FAerialTarget/Documents/First-UCAVs.pdf
, accessed March 6, 2013.

code name Project Anvil
: Walter J. Boyne, “The Remote Control Bombers,”
Air Force
, November 2010, pp. 86–88, provides an authoritative account of Project Aphrodite and Project Anvil. Some details about Kennedy's mission were taken from the Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum website,
http://www.aviation museum.net/Joe_Kennedy.htm
, accessed March 6, 2013. The precise location where Kennedy's plane went down was provided in an e-mail to the author from Dr. Peggy Fraser of Denver, Colorado, whose mother was Lieutenant Willy's fiancée at the time of his death.

was going to fly
: William Wagner,
Lightning Bugs and Other Reconnaissance Drones: The Can-Do Story of Ryan's Unmanned “Spy Planes”
(Fallbrook, Calif.: Aero Publishers Inc., 1982).

Firebees, Fireflys, and Lightning Bugs
: Newcome,
Unmanned Aviation
, p. 83.

They had to be launched
: Col. (Ret.) Jerry Knotts and Col. (Ret.) Patrick R. O'Malley, “The Big Safari Program Story … as Told by the Big Safari People,” unpublished manuscript provided to the author.

More than half
: Newcome,
Unmanned Aviation
, p. 86.

seen as more promising
: Thomas P. Ehrhard, “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the United States Armed Services: A Comparative Study of Weapon System Innovation,” Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C., June 2000, pp. 120–25.