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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
Originally Neal had wanted to spend the summer flying across the Soviet Union to see what lay behind the Iron Curtain, but the Soviet embassy in Washington never got the brothers the necessary permission from Moscow. Since both Neal and Linden had studied Spanish at Yale, they had decided instead to explore Latin America and look for a business opportunity to pursue after college. “Presented with a fait accompli,” as a newspaper article later recounted, “their parents became resigned and then enthusiastic about their summer plans.”
The trip to Latin America would be more expensive than the Yale Daily News expedition, and Neal decided they should finance this one by putting together a “syndicate” of newspapers to buy articles and photos. To establish the syndicate, they spent their 1956 spring vacation flying across the United States, pitching their proposal to city editors at major papers. Before each stop, they would send the next newspaper on their list a “night letter” (a reduced-rate telegram transmitted after office hours for delivery the next morning) requesting an appointment. Then, without awaiting a reply, they would fly in and show up in person to describe their plan. For a package fee of $1,500, they offered fifteen hundred words of copy and four glossy photos a week.
Their syndication plan succeeded splendidly. They signed up major papers coast to coast, including the Boston Globe, New York Herald Tribune, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Houston Post, San Diego Union, and their hometown Denver Post. The papers paid the brothers a combined $3,000 in advance, more than covering the $1,350 they had paid for the used 1946 Piper Super Cruiser they had purchased to fly across the country while putting the syndicate together. Buoyed by that success, and realizing they needed an aircraft with more power, speed, and range for the expedition to Latin America, the Blues now elevated their aim. On a trip to New York, they visited Life magazine and negotiated another good deal. Life would provide them all the film they needed for the trip and consider buying their story when they got back. Armed with that commitment, the Blues next contacted the New York public relations agency for Piper Aircraft, whose director liked the idea of the free publicity the young men were promising if the company loaned them a better plane than their Super Cruiser. An agreement was quickly struck there, too, and the Blues delivered as promised.
Their trip in the Blue Bird—as they dubbed the brand-new, four-seat, fabric-covered Tri-Pacer plane Piper loaned them—included a number of adventures. In Ecuador, they visited with headhunters who showed them “the apple-sized and goateed head of a German prospector the Indians had captured 25 years ago.” In Chile, they skied the Andes in springtime and had to make ad hoc repairs to their landing gear after a wheel rolled into a deep rut during a takeoff from frozen Lago de los Incas. In Brazil they got lost over some flatlands, ran low on fuel, and had to make a forced landing on a country road, bashing their plane’s wings into fence posts as they bounced to a stop. While Neal flew home to arrange repairs for the Blue Bird, Linden spent two weeks in Brazil, putting his time to good use by interviewing the country’s president, Juscelino Kubitschek, for their newspaper syndicate and sunbathing on a Rio de Janeiro beach with a pretty girl he met there.
Ultimately their aerial expedition included forty-four stops in one hundred and ten days and nine crossings of the Andes. Life bought their story and photos for eight thousand dollars, a princely sum in the 1950s, and then featured Neal and Linden on the cover of its April 8, 1957, issue, under the headline “The Flying Blue Brothers.” Shown in the cockpit of the Blue Bird wearing gleeful grins, the two dashing young men looked for all the world as if they were capable of anything.
* * *
Neal and Linden Blue found the investment opportunit
y they were looking for during one of the first stops on their tour. In Managua, Nicaragua, a letter of introduction from some friends of their mother’s got them an interview with the president, Anastasio Somoza García, who had been the country’s dictator and a reliable U.S. ally for two decades. Their talk with “Tacho” Somoza in July 1956 was not intended as grist for their articles for Life or the newspapers; instead, it was meant to be a discussion of investment ideas between a couple of ambitious young Americans endowed with pioneering spirit and a head of state eager to explore new financial opportunities. Tacho liked wealth himself—he generally used patronage rather than violence to maintain power—and couldn’t have been more charmed by his young visitors. When Neal told him that some agronomists the brothers had met in Guatemala thought they might find it profitable to grow cacao, the basis for chocolate and other foods, Somoza was all for it.
“Why don’t you guys come down and go into business?” asked the president, who had spent his teenage years in Philadelphia and gone to college at a small business school there.
A year later, using some of their Life and newspaper fees to buy a plane of their own, the Blues flew back to Managua. But this time they would not be meeting with Tacho Somoza: he was dead, shot on September 21, 1956, by an assassin who was himself killed on the spot. Tacho’s eldest son, Luis, was now president, and Neal and Linden visited the new ruler. They also renewed acquaintances with Luis’s younger brother, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, a Class of ’46 West Point graduate known as Tachito, who served as a senior official in the National Guard and helped his brother rule Nicaragua. When the Blues explained that they were interested in starting a cacao plantation on the country’s agriculturally underdeveloped east coast, they found Tachito just as welcoming as his father had been.
“Well, happy to have you here,” Tachito replied. “That would go well here in Nicaragua, and furthermore, we have some land that we’ll invest in your company for an equity position. So come to Nicaragua!”
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