PILOTLESS PLANES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19325, 2 June 1925, Page 10

PILOTLESS PLANES

COMING FRENCH TESTS WIRELESS CONTROL FRO Al A DESK (Dailv Express Correspondent) PARIS, April 13. France will soon possess fleets of both military and commercial aeroplanes which will navigate without any living soul in them, if tests which are to be made shortly with an apparatus constructed in the greatest secrecy give the results which the Government experts anticipate. An officer will sit in his room at the War Office 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 aeroplanes will have neither pilot nor navigator, but 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 also may drop bombs by wireless. A man will sit before the wireless transmitting apparatus in the offices of one of the big air transportation companies. He will send wireless orders to pilotless aeroplanes carrying good® 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. AVHAT THE “PILOT” IS The first tests on a complete scale are to be made in a few weeks’ time at the military air station at Istrcs, within a few miles of the Mediterranean, at the mouth of the River Rhone. AVith the permission of General Nollet, Alinistcr for AVar, I was allowed to visit this aerodrome and to sec the “wireless pilot,” and the general principles on which it works were explained to me. The “telemechanic” apparatus, as it is called, can be fitted to any type of aeroplane. It is attached to the fuselage 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 arc transmitted to the aeroplane either from the ground or from Another aeroplane in the air. Thus a wireless operator in a machine with 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 Übout to be made will be a Breguct machine of the type used by Captain Pelletier I D’Oisy in Jus otp»p flio-ht from Paris to Tokio. j