Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

An unmanned aerial vehicle, commonly called a drone, is an aircraft that carries no human pilot, crew or passengers on board and is instead flown autonomously or by remote control. Austrian forces attempted the earliest recorded military use of unmanned aircraft in 1849, launching roughly 200 incendiary balloons against Venice, though wind carried most off target, and the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo demonstrated a radio-control system called the Telekino at the Paris Academy of Science in 1903 as a way to test airships without risking a pilot. Powered radio-controlled flight followed in 1917, when Geoffrey de Havilland's monoplane, built for A. M. Low's Aerial Target program, flew successfully under radio control on 21 March, and the de Havilland Queen Bee aerial target drone entered mass production in 1935, with more than 400 built for military training, the first large-scale deployment of unmanned aircraft.