It was called “Operation Aphrodite” and its premise was simple. Find a way to use the myriad of airplanes that had been deemed unfit for active duty and do so in a way that would help the cause. The solution? Pack them full of 10-tons of explosives and a remote control system so that they could be flow into stuff without a pilot on board. With only 19 missions flown, several men killed, and limited success, the program was scrapped but it still bears talking about because of how bold the idea was and how the planes were controlled.
For starters, pilots were needed to get the planes off the ground and up to altitude. That was part of the issue. The idea of this whole thing was so dangerous that the pilots were taken on a volunteer basis. Because the 20,000lbs of explosive needed to be armed and the guys needed to jump out of the plane after doing that, things did not always go as planned. Some guys were struck by the airplanes as they jumped out, others had parachute failures, and on at least one occasion, the airplane exploded as the bomb was armed. That particular incident killed John F Kennedy’s brother.
The guidance was the most amazing part of the whole deal. So the controls were all hooked to servos or electric motors of some kind that would be controlled by guide plane that was actually flying in the vicinity of the abandoned aircraft. Two closed circuit television cameras would beam the images of the gauges back to the other plane where the remote pilot would control the aircraft by reading the instruments, adjusting the throttle and other controls, in the hope of sending this baby into the target.
The idea for these was to fly them into heavily fortified bunkers and blow them up. The British had developed the Tall Boy and Grand Slam bombs which were so-called “earthquake” bombs capable of burrowing into the ground and exploding at some depth. Ultimately those were the better option but this was a pretty amazing idea and execution for the 1940s.
The roots of today’s scarily versatile drones seem to be in the rudimentary and dangerous work of these pilots in WWII.
