Read Predator for Free Online Page A

McCulloch 101 go-kart engine. Radio-controlled, the Albatross could take off and land like a regular airplane using detachable landing gear and a nose wheel. It also had a parachute for emergency landings. Most notably, Karem’s little drone weighed 105 pounds when totally empty but could carry 95 pounds of fuel, an uncommonly high “fuel fraction” of 47.5 percent—a key feature of aircraft endurance.
    *   *   *
    To build the Albatross, Karem hired just two helpers. The first was Jim Machin, a premed student and free-flight modeler recommended by a mutual friend when Karem was looking for someone to help him film a deep stall demonstration. Even as he developed the Albatross, Karem was talking to DARPA about creating a larger drone for the Navy, an aircraft configured in much the same way but whose wings and stabilizers would fold into its fuselage so it could be launched into the air with a booster rocket from a shipboard canister. This larger RPV would be recovered by putting it into a nose-up deep stall, then catching it in a net on the ship’s deck after a retrorocket slowed its descent. A DARPA official who heard Karem describe his concept couldn’t believe it was possible to put an aircraft into such a stall without crashing it. One day, as Dina and Abe drove home from a morning spent with Machin filming deep stalls performed by one of Karem’s free-flight gliders, Dina asked Abe, “Didn’t you want somebody to help you in the garage?” Soon the college student was in Abe’s garage four hours a day, making composite parts, helping Karem put his prototype together, and ultimately abandoning his own plans to go to medical school.
    Karem’s second hire was Jack Hertenstein, a UCLA-educated electronics engineer he had met at Developmental Sciences. Though endowed with a wry sense of humor, Hertenstein showed little interest in other humans and had a number of unique habits. His lunch each day consisted of a can of beans and a can of tuna, eaten directly out of their containers with a wooden tongue depressor and followed religiously by a banana and a Snickers bar. He was equally addicted to remote-control aircraft. Born in 1937, the same year as Karem, Hertenstein was twenty-eight and a well-paid engineer at a big aerospace company when he abruptly stopped his new Austin Healey sports car along a country road on a Sunday afternoon. Seeing some people using handheld radio control systems to fly little airplanes, he decided to watch and was smitten. The next morning, Hertenstein was waiting at the door when his local hobby shop opened. He bought one of every radio control model airplane in stock, thinking to himself as a bemused clerk tallied the substantial bill, “This just has to be done, and it’s going to be done, and we’ve got a lot of money, so just go ahead and do it.”
    Seventeen years later, Hertenstein was an expert in every aspect of radio control and in avionics (a contraction of “aviation electronics”), which happened to be one of the few aspects of aircraft technology in which Karem had limited expertise. Karem hired Hertenstein in October 1982 to design and build reliable electronic devices to operate the Albatross’s control surfaces and internal machinery, to put together its radio control system and autopilot, and to be its primary operator. By this time, Karem was acutely aware he needed help with avionics, for a year earlier a first prototype built using electronics bought from a subcontractor had crashed on its maiden flight at a federal test range in Utah. The pyrotechnics used to deploy its parachute had been miswired. DARPA had scheduled another Albatross test flight for the following summer, but as Karem watched the Utah test range technicians fail to get tracking equipment and other gear needed for the demonstration working properly, his patience ran out. He packed up the Albatross, left without letting