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with “burden” ever since 1798, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his epic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Karem’s Albatross, however, would prove to be not a burden but a boon.
    Thoroughly schooled in the hapless history of unmanned aircraft, Karem believed RPVs had largely failed to catch on for two reasons: most could fly for only a couple of hours at a time and most fell out of the sky at rates that would raise alarms if anyone were inside them. He blamed those flaws on the fact that most RPVs had been developed either by modelers accustomed to making toys that were cheap to build and replace or by aerospace corporations whose best people worked on more lucrative products and whose unmanned aircraft were designed, like target drones, to be expendable, not least because their customers, the military, expected no better.
    Karem took an entirely different approach. At IAI, he had always encouraged his staff to be innovative because, as he liked to say, “The customer doesn’t really know what he wants.” What Karem meant was that military officers couldn’t possibly know enough about the latest technologies to understand what was feasible. At weekly meetings, he had instructed his IAI engineers to figure out what the customer wanted, then try to design something providing three to five times as much capability. Now working out of his garage in Los Angeles, Karem was determined to design his Albatross well enough to show potential customers that a drone could stay airborne not just for hours but for days at a time. He was also convinced that he could build his RPVs with the same rigor and reliability required of the fighter planes he worked on in Israel.
    By a stroke of good fortune, one of the first people to befriend Karem in Los Angeles was Ira Kuhn, a physicist consultant to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known by the acronym DARPA. Then, as now, DARPA existed to fund farsighted and even far-fetched ideas to help the military stay on the cutting edge of technology. Kuhn and Karem met at a tiny Santa Monica company called Developmental Sciences Inc., where Karem had gone to work in 1977 to gain a foothold in the U.S. aerospace industry. Karem was helping the two engineer owners develop a couple of RPVs, including one for DARPA whose progress Kuhn was monitoring for the agency. When Karem quit Developmental Sciences in 1980—storming out one day after the owners refused to make him a full partner—and went to work full-time in his Hacienda Heights garage, Kuhn persuaded DARPA to fund development of Karem’s Albatross. Fearing Defense Department auditors would object to funding an aircraft being developed in a garage, however, DARPA gave Kuhn’s consulting company a $350,000 contract to finance Karem’s work. “We were DARPA’s conduit to get it to him,” Kuhn explained years later. Karem’s work in Israel had such a good reputation that, even if Karem was working out of a garage, DARPA Director Robert Fossum figured his Albatross project was a good bet.
    The Albatross wasn’t meant to be an operational RPV, just a technology demonstrator. It wasn’t much bigger than a model, and was made mostly of mahogany plywood, spruce, urethane foam, and fiberglass shaped in molds Karem had fabricated himself. The diameter of the fuselage’s bullet-shaped nose measured 300 millimeters, or 11.8 inches, the same as the unvarying chord of its 15-foot wing. The wing sat atop the fuselage, midway between the nose and tail; at its rear end, a small vertical stabilizer 18 inches tall and half as wide pointed straight up. Two larger tail fins, or horizontal stabilizers, extended down in an inverted V, a configuration Karem chose so those appendages could serve as skids and keep the pusher propeller on the tail from hitting the ground during runway landings. The propeller, meanwhile, was powered by a two-stroke, single-cylinder