Most UAV manufacturers are developing payloads and synergetic support systems for non-military applications like counter-terror operations, disaster management, border and urban surveillance, ground and sea traffic monitoring, crop diagnosis and ground mapping

I heard some one say the other day .......last of the fighter pilots may already have been born. It wasn’t music to my ears, especially having been a fighter pilot all through my career and even after hanging my overall recently, I read with great interest the progress of the Medium Multi Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) programme of the Indian Air Force (IAF), as well as the futuristic Indo-Russian Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) programme. But this operator of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was very emphatic about what he had said and began enumerating a number of futuristic applications on the anvil in this field. These sound interesting.

The century of manned aviation was celebrated just six years ago and in just a decade from now, on March 6, 2018, we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of unmanned aviation. As per the broad definition, unmanned aviation encompasses a wide range of airborne platforms, starting originally from an aerial torpedo or the forerunner of today’s cruise missile and Precision Guided Munition (PGM), to the futuristic astralplanes being developed to fly in the atmospheres of other galaxies. Other applications from this family tree include the recoverable aero models, target drones, decoys, reconnaissance as well as armed platforms; which are collectively known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). This term is already changing to Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), with increasing number of dull and dangerous missions; at present flown by combat pilots both, fixed and rotary wing, being taken over by such robotic flying machines.

In addition to the flight itself, the development of unmanned aircraft hinged on the confluence of three critical technologies. There was a need to incorporate automatic stabilisation, remote control and autonomous navigation. Elmer Sperry of USA was the first person to attempt an unmanned aircraft design to address all the three issues on a single platform. The efforts resulted in the invention of an Aerial Torpedo. Soon after this event, efforts were being made both in the US and the UK to design radio controlled recoverable aerial targets which were successfully flown in September 1924. Target drones were introduced in 1930 as a spin-off from these early efforts. Prior to World War II, a large number were being flown regularly in both the countries to train anti-aircraft gunners. Interestingly, some of these were assembled by one 19-year-old Norma Jean Dougherty, an employee, who later became a successful Hollywood star popularly known as Marilyn Monroe!

In the later years, unmanned aviation progressed rather slowly, with USAF using such machines mainly as reconnaissance drones in the Vietnam War. Although research work on miniaturisation, incorporating inertial navigation and GPS as well as data link continued, it was the Israeli Defence Forces that were the first to exploit the capability of these platforms. In the Yom Kippur war of 1973 with Syrian intention of recapturing the Golan Heights, Israel used their UAVs to gain critical information on the advancing armour, which helped them set up an ambush and achieve decisive victory despite Syrian numerical superiority. However, the world came to know about the potential of the UAV only after the 1982 Bekaa Valley operations, where Israel used these as force multipliers.