Predator (5 page)

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To build the Albatross, Karem hired just two helpers. The first was Jim Machin, a premed student and free-flight modeler recommended by a mutual friend when Karem was looking for someone to help him film a deep stall demonstration. Even as he developed the Albatross, Karem was talking to DARPA about creating a larger drone for the Navy, an aircraft configured in much the same way but whose wings and stabilizers would fold into its fuselage so it could be launched into the air with a booster rocket from a shipboard canister. This larger RPV would be recovered by putting it into a nose-up deep stall, then catching it in a net on the ship's deck after a retrorocket slowed its descent. A DARPA official who heard Karem describe his concept couldn't believe it was possible to put an aircraft into such a stall without crashing it. One day, as Dina and Abe drove home from a morning spent with Machin filming deep stalls performed by one of Karem's free-flight gliders, Dina asked Abe, “Didn't you want somebody to help you in the garage?” Soon the college student was in Abe's garage four hours a day, making composite parts, helping Karem put his prototype together, and ultimately abandoning his own plans to go to medical school.

Karem's second hire was Jack Hertenstein, a UCLA-educated electronics engineer he had met at Developmental Sciences. Though endowed with a wry sense of humor, Hertenstein showed little interest in other humans and had a number of unique habits. His lunch each day consisted of a can of beans and a can of tuna, eaten directly out of their containers with a wooden tongue depressor and followed religiously by a banana and a Snickers bar. He was equally addicted to remote-control aircraft. Born in 1937, the same year as Karem, Hertenstein was twenty-eight and a well-paid engineer at a big aerospace company when he abruptly stopped his new Austin Healey sports car along a country road on a Sunday afternoon. Seeing some people using handheld radio control systems to fly little airplanes, he decided to watch and was smitten. The next morning, Hertenstein was waiting at the door when his local hobby shop opened. He bought one of every radio control model airplane in stock, thinking to himself as a bemused clerk tallied the substantial bill, “This just has to be done, and it's going to be done, and we've got a lot of money, so just go ahead and do it.”

Seventeen years later, Hertenstein was an expert in every aspect of radio control and in avionics (a contraction of “aviation electronics”), which happened to be one of the few aspects of aircraft technology in which Karem had limited expertise. Karem hired Hertenstein in October 1982 to design and build reliable electronic devices to operate the Albatross's control surfaces and internal machinery, to put together its radio control system and autopilot, and to be its primary operator. By this time, Karem was acutely aware he needed help with avionics, for a year earlier a first prototype built using electronics bought from a subcontractor had crashed on its maiden flight at a federal test range in Utah. The pyrotechnics used to deploy its parachute had been miswired. DARPA had scheduled another Albatross test flight for the following summer, but as Karem watched the Utah test range technicians fail to get tracking equipment and other gear needed for the demonstration working properly, his patience ran out. He packed up the Albatross, left without letting the technicians fly it, and hired Hertenstein a few weeks later.

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A little before noon on November 30, 1983, Jack Hertenstein and two Air Force engineers sent by DARPA were standing on a dry lakebed at El Mirage, near Adelanto, California, under clear skies, watching a new Albatross lazily orbit a two-mile aerial course about a thousand feet overhead. The Albatross would continue to orbit above the three men for an hour, and then another hour, and then another hour.

Over the past two years, Karem and his two-man team had not only built a better prototype but also improved nearly every piece of equipment needed to operate it, from an analog autopilot Hertenstein designed that measured air pressure at the wingtips and stabilized the plane as it flew, to a data link that beamed to the ground information such as speed, altitude, and climb rate. With Hertenstein standing ready to take over with a radio control box if necessary, Karem and Machin were taking turns piloting the Albatross from inside a nearby camping trailer. They had converted the trailer to a ground control station for the Albatross by removing the air conditioner to make space and installing a small control panel with a couple of TV monitors and joysticks. For this DARPA test flight, which had begun with a rolling takeoff at 11:39 a.m., they had also installed a special device in the Albatross to measure how much fuel the drone was burning each minute it flew.

At two hundred minutes, Hertenstein told Karem they should land because the sun would soon be setting and it would be unsafe to fly with no lights on the Albatross. Using his radio control box, Hertenstein took over the flying—and had to break off his first attempt to conclude the flight when a dirt biker who appeared from out of nowhere zipped directly across the drone's landing path. On the next try, Hertenstein brought the Albatross in smoothly, flaring the nose upward to slow its final approach speed from about sixty-three to fifty-five miles per hour as it touched down. The wheels hit the lakebed at 3:14 p.m., bringing the test's total flight time to three hours, thirty-five minutes. The fuel monitor showed that, at the rate at which its go-kart engine had been consuming gas, the Albatross could have remained airborne an astonishing forty-eight hours or more—five to ten times as long as any RPV ever flown.

The DARPA official in charge of Karem's project, Robert M. Williams, was gratified to hear the test results, and not only because the data confirmed his own calculations. When Williams had told some Air Force experts that Karem was developing a drone able to carry close to its own weight in fuel and fly for two days and maybe more, they assured him that no one could design such an aircraft, that physics made it impossible. Abe Karem had proved them wrong. But when he looked upon what he had made, he knew it was just a beginning.

 

2

THE BLUES

They called it the
Yale Daily News
Asian Expedition, a rather grandiose appellation, perhaps, for four college students on a road trip. But even in his twentieth year, Neal Blue liked to think big, and the concept had been his. The plan was to spend the summer of 1955 driving a car from Paris to Calcutta, skirting the Iron Curtain to learn how people on the edge of the Soviet Bloc lived and how their economies functioned. Even in his second year at Yale University, Blue was keenly interested in such matters.

Medium in height, modest in weight, chiseled in his features, sophisticated beyond his years, he was the eldest son of hardworking Denver, Colorado, Realtors James E. and Virginia Neal Blue, politically active Republicans whose pro-business, anticommunist views were passed on to their offspring. Having bought and sold used cars during his high school years because he could make a lot more money that way than by mowing lawns, Neal already knew he would be an entrepreneur after he finished Yale. He was a pure-blooded—and often enough in later years a cold-blooded—capitalist, a shrewd deal maker with a nose for opportunity and a knack for planning and finance. “He always had a plan,” his high school friend Norman Augustine would remember decades later. “To make some money or win an election or write an article or give a speech or what have you.” Moreover, as the audacious expedition he put together before his twenty-first birthday proved, and as he would demonstrate repeatedly later in life, Neal Blue knew not only how to
make
big plans, but also how to
execute
them, a crucial step that eludes most big thinkers. In time, his abilities would make him uncommonly wealthy. They would also make him a founding father of the drone revolution.

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A photo taken on June 3, 1955, shows Blue with three Yale classmates who had decided to join him and spend the summer between their sophomore and junior years on a ten-week, seventeen-country, two-continent odyssey—an undertaking more daring than it might sound in these days of cell phones and the Internet. The four young Americans were going to cross merciless deserts and rugged mountains in lands where the roads were poor and the inhabitants could be hostile—lonely places where the bad luck of a breakdown or an encounter with armed brigands could mean serious trouble, even death.

The well-scrubbed young faces of Blue and his upper-crust Class of '57 partners, Henry G. von Maur, Charles W. Trippe, and G. Morgan Browne Jr., betrayed no trepidation as they posed for a news photographer at New York Harbor on the eve of their departure. Standing dockside next to the red-and-white Dodge Sierra that would carry them on their trek, wearing suits and ties and short haircuts, they were clearly trying hard to look serious while seeming to scrutinize an invisible spot on the station wagon's hood. Berthed in the background was the luxurious and historic SS
Ile de France.
The grand ocean liner—which had crossed the Atlantic regularly a few years earlier to convoy GIs to Europe to fight World War II—would now convey the Dodge Sierra to the continent for an exploit the Yale men would document in dispatches to the
New York Times
.

“They will sail tomorrow for France,” the photo caption inaccurately reported. Trippe's father was Pan American World Airways founder Juan Trippe, so while the car would sail, the young men would fly to Europe via Pan Am. Several weeks earlier, Trippe Sr. had also secured them a meeting with the publisher of the
Times
, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, during which the four classmates would pitch their proposal that the paper pay them for regular reports on their expedition as it unfolded. Blue figured they needed to prove that they were serious about their undertaking, so before going to see Sulzberger at the newspaper's Times Square headquarters, he and his friends put together a slick brochure describing their “Global Goodwill Tour.” The publisher agreed to buy a weekly article with photos, so their next stop was the Chrysler Building, a few blocks east, on Forty-Second Street. There, the promise of coverage in the
Times
got the students not only free use of the Dodge Sierra but also modifications to toughen it for the rigors of Third World roads. “Dodge engineers have equipped the car with heavy duty springs, a heavy duty cooling system, battery and generator as well as tinted glass to cut down on heat,” the dockside photo's caption noted. “The car is also equipped with a special engine that will operate on low octane gas.”

Their itinerary would take the four young men from France to Germany to Austria; then south through Communist but independent Yugoslavia and on to Greece; then east through Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and finally to India. From Calcutta, they would fly home. “U.S. Students Find Contrasts on Balkan Tour,” read the headline on the first article they filed, which noted that jagged rocks in a rutted, unpaved road in the Yugoslav province of Macedonia had dented the Dodge's gas tank and “smashed” the exhaust pipe. A July 22 article reported a “rough, three-day drive” across the Iraqi desert from Syria to Baghdad. Eight days later, they were in Kabul, Afghanistan: “4 Yale Men Greeted by Afghans with Free Tea and Free Shave,” the headline said. “The Afghans are not far from Stone Age culture in some places,” the Yale men reported. “Their standard of living is the lowest the expedition has seen. But they have a pride and independence that command respect.” Three weeks later,
Times
readers learned that “Driving through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan was like moving into a new world, or at least a different age.” Once out of the pass, which cut through Pakistan's ungoverned North West Frontier Province, the Yale men saw that “an amazing number of areas were set aside for specialized military training.” Even in Peshawar, a relatively modern city, “the tribesmen stroll through the streets carrying rifles,” they reported. “A glance at their long knives and war axes made it easy to believe their reputation as among the fiercest warriors in the world.”

The expedition was a great success, and it only whetted Neal's appetite for adventure. A few days before Christmas that same year, his parents were startled to get a long-distance call from Neal and his brother, Linden, who was one year younger and one year behind Neal at Yale, saying they were on their way home to Denver for the holidays but were spending the night in Pittsburgh. They would also need to spend a night or two elsewhere along the way, they added, for they were flying themselves home in the Yale Aviation Club's two-seat Aeronca Chief airplane, which with a 65-horsepower engine didn't fly very fast. In fact, following the Pennsylvania Turnpike across the state as a navigation aid on that dreary winter day, Neal and Linden had seen cars below moving faster than their plane.

Their parents were flabbergasted.
Flying yourselves?
That was when their sons explained how they had each taken forty hours of flying lessons at four dollars an hour that fall. Linden had gotten his pilot's license the day before they left New Haven. Neal would get his license only after the holidays, but they were already pretty proficient pilots. Otherwise, the Yale Aviation Club wouldn't have entrusted them with its Aeronca. It was all part of a marvelous idea Neal had for a trip even more audacious than the
Yale Daily News
Asian Expedition, but they would explain that part when they got home.

Four days later, safe and sound in Denver, Neal and Linden told their parents they wanted to buy a small plane of their own and spend the next summer flying through Latin America. They would start in Denver, hop to Mexico, and then fly through Central America to Panama, over the water to Colombia, and then weave down the jagged Cordillera de los Andes mountain chain on the west side of the South American continent to Santiago, Chile. Turning east, they would fly to Argentina, then head north through Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela, and across the Caribbean before landing in Miami. They planned to conclude their journey back in New Haven as the fall semester at Yale began.