http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-t...ator-180953940/

On May 1, 2000, when Jumper, chief of Air Combat Command, announced his intent to arm the 27-foot-long reconnaissance drone, using the unarmed version to look for Osama bin Laden was still no more than an idea the National Security Council’s Richard Clarke and the CIA’s Charlie Allen were urging on their reluctant bosses. Hardly anyone outside the military even knew what a Predator was, and many insiders were unimpressed by the fragile little reconnaissance drone, which in Bosnia had proved vulnerable to bad weather and relatively easy for the enemy to shoot down. The Air Force owned only 16 Predators at the time, and was planning to buy a total of only 48 Predators by the end of 2003.

In 1999, Jumper had directed the Air Force to experiment with putting laser designators on the drone; arming it was what he called “the next logical step.” For technical, legal, and cultural reasons, that step was a giant one. Since the Kettering Bug, World War I’s never-used “aerial torpedo,” the U.S. military had tried putting explosives or bombs or missiles on drones several times, but the results were never satisfactory. The closest brush with success came in the 1970s, when the Air Force and Teledyne Ryan put the TV-guided Maverick missile and later a TV-guided glide bomb on some Firebee target drones. By firing a Maverick from a modified Firebee on December 14, 1971, at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the Air Force’s 6514th Test Squadron claimed a place in aviation history: the first launch of an air-to-ground missile from a remotely piloted aircraft. None was put into operation, though, and with the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Air Force interest in drones evaporated. The Navy, meanwhile, cancelled the most extensive armed UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) program in U.S. history the same year the armed Firebee was tested, retiring its QH-50 DASH drone helicopter, which carried torpedoes and even nuclear depth bombs that were never used in combat.

Grimes’ staff came up with three options. The Air Force, they found, owned no weapons light enough for a Predator to carry and had only two experimental ones in the works, the Small Smart Bomb and a lightweight, air-launched cruise missile that was still just a concept. The Army, however, had a missile that Big Safari thought showed promise. It weighed a mere 98 pounds but packed enough punch to kill a tank. Army helicopters had first fired it in combat nine years earlier, during the 1991 Gulf War, so it was proven. The Army had more than 11,000 in stock, and the Navy and Marine Corps had some too. Best of all, this Army missile was a “smart” weapon; it homed in on its targets by seeking the sparkle of a laser designator. The missile’s official designation was AGM-114, with AGM standing for “antitank guided missile.” Its official name was Heliborne-Launched Fire-and-Forget Missile. But to those familiar with it, the missile was known by an acronym describing what it delivered—-Hellfire.

On Friday, February 16, 2001, Air Force Captain Curt Hawes would make aviation history, becoming the first person ever to launch a Hellfire missile from a Predator in flight. Certain the test would be covered by CNN, Hawes told his parents back in Minnesota to watch for him. The first Hellfire launch from a Predator in flight would indeed be historic, and the test was no secret. The Air Force and General Atomics would issue news releases about it, prompting Inside the Air Force and the Las Vegas Review-Journal to write articles about the project. As it turned out, however, the event was of far less interest to CNN than to the CIA and the NSC. Curt Hawes and most others on the test team were oblivious to the intelligence agencies’ interest in what they were doing. Big Safari’s Hellfire test director Mattoon, however, knew who the armed Predator’s first customer was likely to be.





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