In all, Cassidy logged about six thousand hours in the cockpit over the course of his thirty-four-year Navy career. He also did several tours behind a desk in the Pentagon, including one year as an “action officer” and a second stint as director of the Navy’s Aircraft Weapons Requirements Branch, followed by three years running the Tactical Readiness Division for the chief of naval operations. Cassidy knew how the sausage was made in the military-industrial complex—how defense equipment got marketed, sold, developed, tested, and put into service. He knew what aircraft the armed services owned, what aircraft they wanted, how they decided what they needed for the future, and how hard it was to get a new program started.
Privately, Cassidy thought Neal Blue’s flying bomb drone idea was dumb, though naturally he didn’t say so in his initial conversations with Blue about working for him. He knew about target drones and the parachute-recovery remotely piloted vehicles used in Vietnam to little effect; and as a fighter pilot, he knew you couldn’t go after heavily armored Russian tanks with little GPS-guided drones. He also knew there was no demand for such a weapon within the armed services. Furthermore, even if the military decided it wanted a drone like the one Blue had in mind, Pentagon regulations would require that the services first write a formal Operational Requirements Document saying what the aircraft had to be able to do, then hold a big competition for a contract to build it—a competition in which a relatively small company like General Atomics would be presented with criteria it likely couldn’t meet. Once Blue hired him, though, Cassidy learned that his new boss wasn’t just daydreaming, and he wasn’t going to be happy until his company was building GPS-guided drones. After all, Neal Blue had made several fortunes in his life by investing where others saw no opportunity. As Blue liked to say, “My golden rule is to always buy straw hats in the winter.” So Cassidy got busy.
One thing he and Blue quickly agreed on was that the newly renamed General Atomics would develop a drone on its own, without government involvement, adopting the “build it and they will come” principle. Blue’s high school friend Norman Augustine, a highly successful and much-admired aerospace executive, had published a popular book in 1983 about the defense acquisition system containing pithy observations he called Augustine’s Laws. One law addressed the inexorable rise in the cost of developing aerospace technology: “In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft.” The Air Force, Navy, and Marines, Augustine added, would have to share the plane. The last thing Blue wanted to do was get tied up in the “defense acquisition system” his friend Augustine had lampooned, a sclerotic bureaucracy that could mangle the execution of even the most elegant technological ideas.
Not long after joining General Atomics, Cassidy met Bill Sadler, an aviation entrepreneur in Scottsdale, Arizona, who had designed and was selling a single-seat “ultralight” plane that Cassidy thought had possibilities. Built for sport, the aluminum monoplane had an open pod cockpit made of fiberglass and Kevlar, a pusher propeller in back of that, and twin booms leading back to a horizontal stabilizer. The configuration resembled a 1950s British fighter jet called the Vampire, so its designer called it the Sadler Vampire.
Sadler, an electrical engineer with a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was intrigued by the idea of turning his sport plane into an “attack drone” so inexpensive that thousands could be sold. After a meeting in June 1987 with the Blues and Cassidy at General Atomics’ headquarters, he signed a time-and-materials contract to convert his Sadler Vampire into a drone with a computerized autopilot whose guidance would come from a GPS receiver. Sadler took one of his ultralights, shortened the wingspan from thirty to eighteen feet, gave it a smaller tail, and then installed a Trimble Navigation GPS receiver and connected it to the autopilot.
Soon Cassidy was flying from San Diego up to Phoenix about once a month to meet with Sadler and gauge his progress. They would rendezvous at Sadler’s house in Scottsdale before sunrise and drive to Gila River Memorial Field, an abandoned single-runway airstrip on a dusty Native American reservation fourteen miles south of Phoenix. Sadler would haul the prototype down from his shop in Scottsdale on a trailer, folding its wings up into a triangle to fit. The two men had to launch early to catch the signals from the only four GPS satellites the military had deployed so far, and one of the men had to be in the cockpit to take off and land and make sure the plane flew properly. Cassidy could fly anything, but he was too big to fit into the little pod cockpit, so Sadler served as safety pilot during the tests, getting the plane airborne and remaining ready to take over when necessary. With each passing month, the autopilot did more of the flying. The goal was to get the plane to the point where its autopilot alone could fly it to waypoints using GPS signals to navigate. Part of the challenge was to program the autopilot so that it wouldn’t put the plane into a stall or otherwise cause it to go out of control.
Neal Blue wanted to call his pet project the Birdie, because “birdies go cheep, cheep, cheep.” Potential military and international customers, he was sure, would get the pun and appreciate the point that this was going to be a very inexpensive weapon. After Cassidy finished rolling his eyes, he started collecting alternative suggestions, and soon a blackboard in his office was cluttered with a couple of hundred possible names. The former Navy admiral pondered them for a while, then chose one he thought conveyed the right image for their product. Early one morning, as Sadler was getting ready to climb into the cockpit for a flight test, Cassidy told him, “Oh, by the way, we have a name for the airplane now.” Then he walked to the tail and smoothed on a sticker bearing the new appellation. Later, Cassidy and the Blue brothers would insist it was pure coincidence that an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie set in Central America and released within days of their first meeting with Bill Sadler was also called Predator.
3
A STRAW HAT IN WINTER
Since 1909, with breaks only for wars, the world’s largest and most important aviation exposition and air show has been held in Paris, France. First staged in the city’s magnificent Grand Palais des Beaux-Arts as L’Exposition Internationale de la Locomotion Aérienne, since 1953 the renamed Salon International de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace has been held four miles north of Paris, at Le Bourget, the city’s first airport, where on May 21, 1927, ecstatic crowds swarmed the Spirit of St. Louis as exhausted American pilot Charles Lindbergh completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight. Now held only in odd-numbered years, the Paris Air Show, as it’s commonly known, attracts aircraft manufacturers, aviation vendors, airline executives, military officers, political leaders, media representatives, and passionate fans of flying from around the globe. Major manufacturers and military powers show off their aircraft in daily aerial displays for the paying public and official attendees. Rich companies rent air-conditioned “chalets” along the runways, where invited guests can drink and dine as they watch, or talk business in private rooms. Major aviation deals are kept secret for weeks or months so they can be announced in Paris, where news-hungry aerospace reporters from every continent are sure to flock for the biennial two-week extravaganza.
No aviation exhibition has ever matched the Paris Air Show. From May 13–23, 1988, though, a small band of politicians and businessmen in San Diego, California, tried. At Brown Field, an old U.S. Navy training base ten miles south of downtown San Diego and a mile and a half north of the Mexican border, they staged “Air/Space America 88,” touted as the first in a biennial series of exhibitions that would rival the Paris Air Show. Aviation Week & Space Technology described the ambitious event as “the latest attempt to establish an all-encompassing international aerospace exhibition in the U.S.”
The show’s opening day featured a visit from Vice President George H. W. Bush and was followed by two weekends of aerial displays open to the ticket-buying public. The Air Force Thunderbirds flew patriotically painted F-16 fighter jets in heart-stopping formation aerobatics. Army paratroopers floated down to targeted spots
on the field with remarkable exactitude. For $985, spectators could circle out over the nearby Pacific Ocean at Mach 2—twice the speed of sound—in an Air France Concorde supersonic transport. Kids of all ages loved the show. More than two hundred thousand people attended. No one would have guessed that the organizers would wind up owing the City of San Diego and other creditors more than four million dollars, bankrupting the Air/Space America organization and making its first edition its last. The show was a critical success but a financial belly flop.
The hidebound mentality of the military-industrial complex was responsible for the failure. Sandwiched between the weekends of aerial wonders were five professional trade days devoid of flying, during which aviation industry executives and marketers hawked their wares to potential military and commercial customers. Four massive white tents arrayed in a quadrant along Brown Field’s 7,972-foot main runway served as pavilions for 350 exhibitors. To the disappointment of the organizers, however, only one major airframe manufacturer, F-16-builder General Dynamics Corporation, exhibited, which was seen as “reflecting industry reluctance to get involved in still another major air show,” Aviation Week commented. Most exhibitors were makers of small aircraft components or service companies, with two prominent exceptions. “Soviet officials were active throughout the show in promoting their products and capabilities,” Aviation Week noted, and “two remotely piloted vehicles were displayed for the first time.”
Looming over Booth 500, a prominently situated space just inside the west entrance to one of the pavilions, was the new General Atomics “Predator” prototype. Painted in green, brown, and beige jungle camouflage, the stubby-winged aluminum monoplane was mounted on a pedestal as if making a diving turn onto a target. Bill Sadler had designed the display and even built the pedestal himself. He and Tom Cassidy were in the booth for much of the show, telling potential customers and reporters how the 340-pound Predator would be capable of carrying 300 pounds of explosives in its nose and flying autonomously for as far as 300 miles at speeds of up to 120 miles an hour to attack out of the blue and with precision. Aviation Week reported that General Atomics “plans to market the vehicle to the Defense Dept. and ultimately to foreign countries as an unmanned, low-cost weapon system to strike enemy targets with guided munitions, cluster weapons or a high explosive warhead.” So far, though, the Predator had been flight-tested for only sixty hours, and never without a safety pilot aboard.
At the southwest end of a pavilion next door was another booth displaying a drone, this one made by an Irvine, California, company called Leading Systems Inc. Neal Blue had heard of Leading Systems, and he knew that its much different RPV, the “Amber,” was funded by DARPA, which meant it must have real potential. But Blue didn’t know much more about Leading Systems or its RPV, so when the youngest of his two sons, freshly minted Cornell University graduate Karsten, said he and a college friend would like to go to the air show, Neal told them to get passes from Cassidy and see what they could find out about the competition while they were there.
The next day, Karsten and his friend Mike Melnick, wearing badges identifying them as “Neal Blue” and “Linden Blue,” turned up at the Leading Systems booth, whose Amber display was impossible to miss. An orange-and-white, full-scale model of the drone’s slender fuselage—a mere seventeen inches in diameter—was standing on its tail, with its nose rising nearly to the top of the two-story tent in a pose one Leading Systems wag called “a gigantic phallic symbol.” The display was all the more striking because, as featured photos showed, the fuselage lacked the real Amber’s willowy wings, pusher propeller, and inverted-V tail. But both the model and the photos showed that the fuselage’s nose had an odd downward bulge.
Manning the booth was a short, bald, middle-aged man with a gentle smile who spoke with a distinctly foreign accent. Seeming happy to meet Karsten Blue and his friend, the man asked if he could scan their badges with a business card reader to store their contact information. He had heard of General Atomics and its Predator, he told them, and would like to know more about their aircraft.
Karsten and Mike Melnick could see that the man was disappointed when they couldn’t provide answers to his detailed questions about the Predator. Moreover, when Karsten tried to change the subject to the Amber, the man turned suspicious. Amber was a government project, he explained, and there were limits to what he could tell them. After all, he added gravely, “For all I know, you are Russian spies.” Then he grinned, but Karsten couldn’t tell if he was teasing.
Karsten chuckled at the suggestion, but he could see that it was time to move on. As he and his friend left, Karsten picked up a company brochure. He also took a closer look at the Leading Systems man’s badge so he could tell his father about him. The badge read, “Abraham Karem, President.”
* * *
There was much Abe Karem could have told his young visitors that spring of 1988, for over the past four and a half years he had been moving rapidly to capitalize on the success of the Albatross technology demonstrator he had built in his garage for DARPA. Within weeks of the November 1983 flight that proved the Albatross’s phenomenal endurance, Karem’s DARPA ally Bob Williams told him to put together a detailed proposal to develop a larger “endurance RPV” that would be able to carry enough weight to perform military missions. Williams said they would call the new drone Amber, and their aim would be to give the military a revolutionary, days-long aerial reconnaissance capability. DARPA’s leaders would never invest much money in such a project, Williams knew, for the agency’s mission was to advance military science, not procure defense equipment. But he was confident his bosses would put at least a few million dollars into the project as seed money, if he could get the armed services to invest as well.
Persuading the services to adopt the cutting-edge technologies DARPA fostered was never a requirement, but it was always a goal, and Williams knew he had a good argument to take to them. After all, Karem had practically defied the laws of physics by designing a plane that weighed 105 pounds empty, 200 pounds fully fueled, and could stay aloft two days on 15.2 gallons of gas. Rather than having to fly dull and sometimes dangerous reconnaissance missions with manned aircraft whose crews had to land after a few hours and risked being shot down over hostile territory, what if the military could just hang an RPV over a target area for days at a time and have it send back imagery of what was happening on the ground below? Williams thought that would be great.
Getting the armed services to change their ways was a Herculean task, but Williams knew the timing for selling such a project to the military was the best in years. In 1984, for the first time since the end of the Vietnam War, senior leaders of the Department of the Navy and the Army were taking a serious interest in reconnaissance drones. So was the Central Intelligence Agency. Each had its own reasons.
Early that year, the Navy Department’s aggressive young secretary, John F. Lehman Jr., had become interested enough in drones to instruct subordinates to buy the Marine Corps an Israeli “mini-RPV” called the Mastiff, and to get U.S. industry involved in developing something like it for both the Marines and the Navy. Lehman had seen the Mastiff fly in Israel in January, during a trip whose purpose was to look for equipment and weapons for the Navy and Marine Corps, which operates under the Navy Department. Lehman scheduled his visit after the most traumatic event in recent Marine Corps history: a terrorist bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 23, 1983, that killed 241 U.S. servicemen, mostly marines. The marines were in Lebanon as part of an international peacekeeping force sent to help tamp down a long-running sectarian civil war. A Muslim terrorist had driven an explosives-laden truck into their barracks, and by the time Lehman landed in Israel, Marine Corps leaders were determined to find better ways to conduct “tactical reconnaissance,” such as detecting enemies before they attack fixed positions.
Lehman saw the Mastiff fly at an Israeli air base in the Negev Desert. At first glance, the drone looked like little more than a big model airplane, but its box
y fuselage had a television camera inside, and Lehman was impressed when his hosts took him into a control van to see live images that the Mastiff was beaming back to a monitor. As a pilot in the van flew the Mastiff by remote control over a practice bombing range a few miles distant, Lehman could see defunct tanks and other vehicles used for target practice by Israeli fighter plane pilots. When the drone circled back to the base, Lehman could look at the monitor and identify the types of aircraft parked on the tarmac. The Mastiff could stay airborne at most four hours, and at relatively low altitude, but Lehman decided the marines could use such a capability, and the drone and its control van were small enough for ground troops to transport.
The Navy secretary was even more excited by the possibility of developing a mini-drone like the Mastiff to spot targets for four World War II battleships he had persuaded President Ronald Reagan and Congress to bring out of mothballs. Each of the four dreadnoughts bristled with nine sixteen-inch guns that could fire man-size shells the weight of an economy car twenty-three miles. But because the munitions came to earth at over-the-horizon distances, the ship’s gunners usually had no way to see where their shells were landing, unless a manned aircraft were sent to observe the target, which was both inefficient and dangerous. Critics derided Lehman’s battleships as far too vulnerable and their guns as far too inaccurate in the guided-missile age, but Lehman saw their sixteen-inch batteries as a terrific standoff weapon and a magnificent reminder of the American might Reagan was reasserting around the globe. To make them more effective and fend off critics, though, he wanted to give their gunners a better way to spot targets. After seeing the Mastiff, he believed reconnaissance drones could be the answer.
DARPA’s Bob Williams thought Army leaders might be interested in the Amber for a different reason. The Army had been trying for more than a decade to develop a Cold War–inspired mini-RPV of its own that could carry a TV camera and a laser designator, a device to shine a laser beam on a target and guide special artillery shells to their mark. The Army’s drone was named Aquila, Latin for “eagle,” but by 1984 this Aquila was proving to be a turkey.
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