A B-17 Flying Fortress in flight, circa 1942–1943. This aircraft was later converted into a BQ-7 and launched against a German V-3 cannon development site in August 1944, without success. (US Army Air Forces)

The World’s First Military Drones Are Older Than You Think

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The BQ-7 drone—a remotely-controlled B-17 Flying Fortress bomber loaded with explosives—required human pilots for takeoff and early flight, a mission that sometimes led to tragedy.

Long before the age of modern one-way attack drones like the Shahed-136 or the LUCAS, the US military experimented with turning entire bombers into flying explosives—effectively borrowing the “kamikaze” concept from the Japanese, minus the pilot. Even more remarkably, these experiments took place at the same time as the kamikazes in the Pacific.

From 1944 onward, the US Army Air Forces launched Operation Aphrodite, a plan to convert damaged or antiquated B-17 Flying Fortress bombers into enormous radio-controlled flying bombs. In the same manner as a Japanese kamikaze, the aircraft would be packed with explosives and flown directly into a heavily fortified German target. Because the flight was intended as a one-way trip, and had no pilot onboard, the aircraft could be unarmored, lack machine guns and other defenses, and use worn-out engines and equipment.

Despite the technologically ambitious nature of the program, the radio-controlled technology was unreliable, and the program was written off as a failure. Yet with 80 years of hindsight, it now seems to have predicted a........

© The National Interest