A hundred years after the Wright Brothers made sustainable powered flight a reality, military aerospace history appears to be repeating itself in one of the sector's newest and most exciting fields of endeavour. The development of the unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV), as revolutionary as its technology is, is a mirror-image of the early evolution of the aircraft as a fighting machine. Just as modern combat aircraft owe their niche in today's military inventories to a time when pilots of scout aircraft started dropping grenades out of open cockpits on to enemy positions, so the first operationally blooded UCAV, an AGM-114 Hellfire-equipped variant of the General Atomics RQ-1 Predator, happens to be an evolution of a platform designed originally for surveillance purposes.
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