Predator Drone | From Albatross to Amber

October 14, 2021·47 min·3 clips

Scott Swanson becomes the first person in history to fire a lethal missile from an unmanned drone, striking a truck believed to carry Mullah Omar.

American Innovations opens at CIA Campus in Langley, Virginia, on October 7, 2001. Scott Swanson is inside an unassuming double-wide trailer. He stares at infrared images on a video screen and works a joystick controller. Mark Cooter sits a few feet behind him and relays orders through his headset. The Predator is about 7,000 miles away, hovering three miles above Kandahar in Afghanistan. It is less than a month after the September 11 attacks, and it is the first night of Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. military campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The crew is surveilling Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, Taliban Supreme Commander Mullah Omar. Swanson and Cooter watch as a three-vehicle convoy pulls into a walled compound of rectangular buildings. Omar is believed to be in one of those vehicles. Swanson stays locked on the aerial view as the convoy crosses a small bridge over a creek. One truck stops just beyond the bridge, and a couple of armed men hop out. The episode then steps back to the earlier history of unmanned flight. Karam's Albatross prototype has just finished an exceptional test. When he checks the gauges, the fuel monitor suggests it could have remained airborne for another 48 hours or so, far longer than expected. Karam is not surprised. After the Albatross's performance, DARPA offers him a $5 million contract to develop an even more advanced drone. The Amber prototype then proves sound, the Navy invests another $25 million, and by July 1985 the Army joins the program, bringing the total Amber budget to $40 million. The funding lets Karam form Leading Systems, Inc., and move his operations into a 180,000-square-foot headquarters in nearby California. From there, he keeps building toward the unmanned-aircraft future he has long imagined. The episode frames that path as a mix of patience, persistence, and shifting institutional belief. It turns a battlefield image into the endpoint of a much longer engineering story.

As heard by us

A patient origin story that turns a drone's first wartime watch into a human history of invention.

An overhead Predator over Kandahar becomes a story about how an unlikely machine enters wartime power. It opens on October 7, 2001, in a double-wide trailer at Langley, with Scott Swanson steering from infrared images while Mark Cooter issues orders, then moves into the first…

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Why you'd press play

You want the Predator's first night on the job, the surveillance mission over Kandahar, and the long build that made unmanned flight possible.

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