A Hollywood actor who loved model planes helped launch the drone industry
Reginald Denny was a film star with a passion for model aircraft. In 1935 he built the first scaled remotely piloted vehicle, and in 1940 he founded the Radioplane Company, whose small craft trained anti-aircraft gunners. Long before quadcopters, pilotless aircraft grew out of target practice.
An unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, is an aircraft with nobody aboard, flown remotely or autonomously. Regulators often speak of unmanned aircraft systems, a term adopted by the US Defense Department and Federal Aviation Administration in 2005, to stress that ground controllers and data links matter as much as the aircraft; Canada adopted a similar label in rules effective 1 June 2019. The FAA now treats any unmanned flying craft as a UAV regardless of weight, and some writers prefer the word uncrewed.
Remote control has a long pedigree. In 1903 the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo presented his Telekino, a radio control scheme, to scientists in Paris, pitching it as a safe way to trial airships with nobody aboard. A. M. Low's Aerial Target of 1916 was the first attempt at a powered UAV, and a monoplane by Geoffrey de Havilland flew under Low's radio control on 21 March 1917. The name drone was in use early on for radio-controlled target planes such as the 1930s de Havilland Queen Bee. Soviet researchers tried flying Tupolev TB-1 bombers remotely in the late 1930s.
Designs are sorted many ways: by weight, altitude, range, endurance and degree of autonomy. One industry scheme runs from hand-held craft at about 600 metres with a 2 kilometre range up to high-altitude, long-endurance types flying above 9,100 metres with effectively unlimited range. ICAO distinguishes plane-like drones that need forward flight from rotor craft that can hover. Power sources include batteries, which are quiet but limit flight time, fuel engines for endurance, hybrids, hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels for very long flights, and nuclear power, which remains theoretical.
Cheaper electronics have spread drones into aerial photography, precision farming, watching for forest fires, weather observation, inspecting infrastructure, delivering parcels and racing. Autonomous models draw on computer vision, machine learning and thermal sensors, and hobby photography drones often stream first-person video.
Source: Unmanned aerial vehicle
