First US Navy Suicide Drones

An F6F Hellcat fighter converted into a suicide drone sits onboard the aircraft carrier USS Boxer during the Korean War. Credit: By USN [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

During the Korean War, a life-or-death race took place between an U.S. Navy Hellcat fighter aircraft and a group of North Koreans on a railroad handcar. Apparently believing that the fighter was preparing to attack with its machine guns, the North Koreans frantically pumped the railroad handcar’s arm as they headed for the safety of a railroad tunnel. They made it inside just before the aircraft crashed into the hillside near the tunnel entrance.

The strange incident marked one of the U.S. Navy’s early experiments with suicide drones in 1952. These early drones tended to be older, obsolete aircraft outfitted with TV transmitters that allowed human pilots to see the drones’ cockpit perspective on a TV screen. That enabled the pilots to remotely control the drone aircraft from the relative safety of a nearby “mothership” or “mother plane” by using radio control. Each of the Hellcat drones was loaded up with a 2,000-pound bomb before becoming the first military drones launched from an aircraft carrier to enter combat.

“When the drone hits the target the screen in the mother plane just goes blank,” said a Navy officer in a United Press interview. “It’s a nice way to fight a war.”

Despite such optimistic statements, the Hellcat drones did not have a significant impact on the Korean War. Just one of six Hellcat drones succeeded in striking a bridge that had been designated as its target, according to Cory Graff’s book “F6F Hellcat at War.” The other Navy suicide drones failed because of malfunctions or missed their intended targets involving a railroad bridge, power plant and the train tunnel. In fact, the Navy described the handful of experiments with the Hellcat drones as an “interim measure” because the U.S. military was already developing guided missiles that could fly farther and hit targets more effectively.

“It wouldn’t take much imagination to realize there are better ways of doing this job,” said Rear Admiral John H. Sides, director of the Guided Missiles Division of the Office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, in a New York Times article.

As military weapons, the crude suicide drones had much more in common with guided missiles than modern military or civilian drones that try to avoid crashing into anything on purpose. But such Navy suicide drones still represent a crucial, if somewhat overlooked, chapter in the history of the U.S. military’s early experiments with unmanned flying vehicles.

Navy Suicide Drones Flying and Failing

Suicide drone experiments began with the U.S. military’s “aerial torpedo” tests during World War I that converted torpedoes into small biplanes with preset target destinations. The U.S. Navy was first to develop this concept with the Curtiss-Sperry Aerial Torpedo that first took flight in December 1917, according to Steven Zaloga’s book “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Robotic Air Warfare 1917-2007.”

The Army Air Force sponsored a competitor in the form of the Liberty Eagle Aerial Torpedo that was also nicknamed the Kettering Bug after its inventor Charles Kettering. The Army Air Force made 50 of the Kettering Bugs before the war’s end, but none of the Kettering Bugs ever saw combat. The project was discontinued in the 1920s due to lack of funding.

Source: Discover Magazine