In my search for weird military aviation books, I came across a recent title that has turned out to be very very interesting: "Q-Birds – American Manned Aircraft As Drones" https://crecy.co.uk/product/q-birds
The book title is inaccurate in one respect unless the QF-86 pilot named Rosemary was a man. It's a thorough exploration of the use of converted human-piloted aircraft as remotely-piloted drones. The book came out in 2024 and covers the span of about 100 years from 1920 to 2020 or so.
My interest is mainly in the sampling drones flown through mushroom clouds during atomic bomb tests. I got that and a lot more. There are a number of photos of QB-17s painted in yellow and black stripes with sampling equipment uncomfortably grafted onto the airframes. There are a few pictures of the planes being decontaminated and moved around by ground crew. I'm not sure I trust the captions that note the workers climbing on the plane implied it was minimally contaminated. If Defense Nuclear Agency reports of Crossroads shots in 1946 are to be believed, it was hard to convince some of the sailors on the support fleet that something invisible with no obvious physical effects could be hazardous. Granted, this was 1946 and there were still a bunch of shoe-fitting x-ray machines out in the wild in the US so who knows.
Aside: Three shots were planned for the Crossroads tests - an airburst, a surface shot, and an underwater shot - but only the first two were conducted. They had called off the third (underwater) shot because the second (surface) shot had pulverized, activated, and lofted so much coral that the support fleet had to be withdrawn. The seawater intake lines for desalination systems on the ships were lit up like a Christmas tree from all the radioactive coral particles they sucked in and the ships needed to get to port for more thorough cleanup. The Navy quickly discovered that just hosing everything down and giving it a good scrub was a lot harder in practice than they originally expected.
Anyway, besides the sampling drones the military used surplus aircraft for missile development and target practice. They spent more effort than I imagined keeping the target drones airworthy.
There were a few incidents where drone controllers lost communication with a drone with "The Battle of Palmdale" being the most famous, stupid, and destructive example. It was one thing chasing down a slow-moving piston-engine drone like the F6F, it was quite another when they started converting more modern jet fighters into drones (F-102 & F-106 Delta Dagger/Dart, F-4 Phantom II, etc.) If the plane was under 1500 ft there was a plan to have the plane just fly straight down into the ground before it could leave the test area. They installed self-destruct charges to blow up the drone if it was at higher altitudes. This posed a safety problem - how do you keep the plane from accidentally exploding on the ground? The self-destruct charge was disarmed if there was any weight on the landing gear. My understanding is this same practice is used to keep people from accidentally retracting the landing gear on airliners while they are on the ground. This has happened at least once. Designing automated safety systems and interlocks is tricky business.
Anyway, I'm well pleased with the book; it's much more detailed and interesting than I imagined when I ordered it.
