Famous people and their encounters with unmanned aviation include…

The Radioplane Company of Van Nuys, California, hired 19-year-old Norma Jeane Dougherty in 1945 as an assembly line worker for its OQ- and TDD-series of target drones for the U.S. Army and Navy. David Conover, a private in Capt Ronald Reagan’s 1st Motion Picture Company assigned to take photographs of women working in war industries, took photos of her for Yank magazine in June 1945 and suggested she attend modeling school. She did, landed a role in the 1947 movie Dangerous Years, changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, and the rest is cinematic trivia.

The U.S. Navy attempted to use PB4Y Liberators (navalized B-24s) whose airframe life had expired as one-way bombers against German targets in World War II. Two crewmen would take the explosive-laden plane off from England, point it in the right direction, then bail out before it crossed the English Channel. President John F. Kennedy’s older brother, Lt Joseph Kennedy, was aboard one such attempt which blew up prematurely over England, killing both crewmen, on 12 August 1944.

Charles Norden, of Norden bombsight fame in World War II, invented the flywheel catapult in 1918 for launching World War I-era “aerial torpedoes.” Immediately after the war, he lead the U.S. Navy project for developing a radio-controlled unmanned aircraft, but it was cancelled after just three flights, none of them unmanned. His work with early autopilots provided him the expertise with gyroscopes that was critical to his development of the famous bombsight.

Orville Wright, co-inventor of the first successful manned aircraft, played a key role in developing the U.S. Army’s first unmanned aircraft, the Liberty Eagle, or “Kettering Bug.” He added the large dihedral angle to the wings to improve its ability to handle side gusts, and, on its first launch attempt in October 1918, warned that it was rolling too slowly to become safely airborne. He was proven correct moments later when it crashed.