PILOTLESS AEROPLANES.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 10 July 1925, Page 8

PILOTLESS AEROPLANES.

AYIIIELESS CONTROL FROM A DESK. Era lice will soon possess fleets of both military and commercial aeroplanes which will navigate without any living soul in them, if tests which arc to be made shortly with an apparatus constructed in the greatest secrecy give the results which the Government experts anticipate (writes the Paris correspondent of the Daily Mail). All officer will sit in his room at the WaxOffice in Paris, and by the simple manipulation of a wireless instrument will control the flight of one or more military machines in the air perhaps several hundreds of miles away. The ’planes will have neither, pilot nor navigator, hut they will strictly obey the orders they receive from Paris by wireless waves. They will manoeuvre, return, and land just as ordered.- In case, of war they may also drop bombs hv wireless.

A man will sit before the wileless transmitting apparatus in the offices of one of the big air transportation companies. lie will send wireless orders to .pilotless ’planes carrying goods to various towns in France, and possibly to other European capitals. The absence of the pilot will leave so much more extra space for the carriage. of goods. Some day, passengers will travel in aeroplanes without pilots, but that day is not yet.

Thu first tests on a complete scale are to be made at the military air station at lstres, within a few miles of the .Mediterranean, at the mouth of the river Rhone. With the permission of General Nollet, Minister of War, I was allowed to visit this aerodrome and to see the ‘-wireless pilot,” and the general principles on which it works were explained to me. The ‘‘telemechanic” apparatus, as it is called, can he fitted to any type of aeroplane. It is attached to the fuselege just beneath the pilot’s seat,, and consists of a gyroscope for maintaining automatic stabilisation and the apparatus for receiving the wireless waves from the ground, and for causing them to operate the, controls' of the motor and of the aeroplane. The wireless waves are tiansmitted to the aeroplane either from the ground or from another aeroplane in the air. Thus a wireless operator in a machine Avith a pilot can drive in front of him and direct the movements of a whole squadron of pilotless aeroplanes. The machine with which the exhaustive tests of. the “wireless pilot” are about to be made will be a Brequet of the type used by Captain Pelletier d’Oi.sy in his great "flight from Paris to Tokio.