The BQ-7 drone—a remotely-controlled B-17 Flying Fortress bomber loaded with explosives—required human pilots for takeoff and early flight, a mission that sometimes led to tragedy.

Long before the age of modern one-way attack drones like the Shahed-136 or the LUCAS, the US military experimented with turning entire bombers into flying explosives—effectively borrowing the “kamikaze” concept from the Japanese, minus the pilot. Even more remarkably, these experiments took place at the same time as the kamikazes in the Pacific.

From 1944 onward, the US Army Air Forces launched Operation Aphrodite, a plan to convert damaged or antiquated B-17 Flying Fortress bombers into enormous radio-controlled flying bombs. In the same manner as a Japanese kamikaze, the aircraft would be packed with explosives and flown directly into a heavily fortified German target. Because the flight was intended as a one-way trip, and had no pilot onboard, the aircraft could be unarmored, lack machine guns and other defenses, and use worn-out engines and equipment.

Despite the technologically ambitious nature of the program, the radio-controlled technology was unreliable, and the program was written off as a failure. Yet with 80 years of hindsight, it now seems to have predicted a major trend of modern warfare.

The BQ-7: The World’s First Remote-Controlled Military Aircraft

By the time of World War II, the idea of using radio waves to control the speed and direction of aircraft was not entirely new. As early as 1909, French engineers had flown a miniature aircraft using wireless telegraphy at an exhibition in Paris, and in the late 1930s, brothers Walter and William Good had built the “Big Guff,” a successful remote-controlled model aircraft. Still, it was one thing to build a small aircraft that one could fly overhead; it was another to adapt a full-size aircraft to remote control and send it off on a mission, when the distances involved would be much greater and feedback would not be immediate. For this reason, the idea of remotely controlling aircraft sat dormant for much of the war.

By 1944, however, Allied forces were confronting heavily fortified German military installations, finding that conventional bombing struggled against some of the Germans’ most deeply protected structures. Military planners called for a weapon capable of delivering an enormous explosive charge directly into a target—and the B-17 offered a useful starting point. Thousands of the bombers had been manufactured, and some older airframes were already worn out or unsuitable for conventional combat operations. Rather than scrap them, the planners proposed turning them into giant guided bombs against Germany. If the weapon could be used effectively in Germany, the thinking went, it could be turned against Japan, which was farther away and harder to target.

The modified B-17s received the designation BQ-7, after being stripped of their guns, armor, and much of the normal internal fittings. Aggressive reductions in weight allowed for the installation of about 20,000 pounds of explosives. To control the BQ-7 from afar, radio-control equipment was connected to the flight controls, throttles, and autopilot, while television cameras transmitted images to accompanying control aircraft that could adjust their flight paths from a closer distance than an airbase hundreds of miles away. One camera allowed operators to see the flight instruments while another provided forward-looking views. Meanwhile, a separate aircraft, often a B-17 control plane, would guide the drone toward the target.

In all, the concept was remarkably sophisticated for 1944—perhaps too sophisticated. Radio-control technology specifically wasn’t reliable enough to handle complete flight independently. So the BQ-7 needed a two-man volunteer crew for takeoff and the initial climb. The crew would start the engines, take off, establish altitude and heading, activate the control system, arm the explosive payload, and then transfer control to the accompanying aircraft. The volunteer crew would then bail out by parachute, while the BQ-7 would continue toward Germany under remote control. The dangers of this setup were obvious; for the first part of the flight, the volunteer crew was effectively sitting inside an enormous flying bomb.

Why Operation Aphrodite Failed

Aphrodite began combat operations in August 1944, launching from bases in England towards German targets. These missions laid bare the limitations of the technology, and the missions consistently failed: the BQ-7s would lose radio contact, malfunction, crash, be shot down by enemy air defenses, and miss the targets. The remote control was extremely primitive relative to today’s technology, and operators had limited situational awareness. The television systems likewise offered only poor images, making it next to impossible to aim the bomber-turned-drone with any degree of accuracy.

Of the 15 missions that Aphrodite aircraft were sent on between August 1944 and January 1945, none were successful; the BQ-7 never achieved a documented destruction of any intended target. Moreover, despite the promise of a remote-controlled bomb decreasing Allied air casualties, the program proved remarkably deadly, with around a half-dozen pilots dying in failed parachute jumps or losing control of the aircraft. In one particularly notorious incident on August 12, 1944, one of the aircraft exploded prematurely over England, killing pilots Joseph Kennedy Jr—the son of Kennedy family patriarch Joseph Kennedy and older brother of future president John F. Kennedy—and Wilford Willy. In January 1945, the USAAF suspended the project, citing its unreliability. It made plans to resume the flights in March and April, but the imminent end of the war ultimately headed these plans off.

Operation Aphrodite was laudable for its ambition and ingenuity, but failed because of the technological limitations of the time. Still, it produced arguably the world’s first one-way attack drone—and provided a model for other aviation pioneers to follow.

About the Author: Harrison Kass

Harrison Kass is a writer and attorney focused on national security, technology, and political culture. His work has appeared in Tablet, City Journal, The Hill, The Spectator, and The Cipher Brief. He holds a JD from the University of Oregon and a master’s in Global & Joint Program Studies from NYU. More at harrisonkass.com.

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