TABLE OF CONTENTS Seventy-one years after Lindbergh's solo crossing of the Atlantic, a small, unmanned aircraft replicated his feat. Doctors Greg Holland and Tad McGeer of The Insitu Group, a small firm located in the Columbia River gorge of the Pacific Northwest, had begun developing the Aerosonde in 1992 as a small- (30-lb) but long-endurance (30-h) carrier for meteorological instruments into open-ocean regions seldom monitored for weather. Designed to be a totally automatic plane, it borrowed a page from Lawrence Sperry's book on launching UAVs by riding in a special car roof rack until the car reached flying speed. At that point, about 50 mph, the driver would reach out, trip a release, and the drone would lift up and away. At mission's end, it would skid to a stop on its reinforced belly. Elegant, reliable, and inexpensive, these techniques sidestepped what had been a nearly insurmountable hurdle for Sperry, Kettering, and the other early pioneers, and allowed Insitu to focus on performing the airborne mission.
Good endurance was critical to competing with weather balloons, and by 1996, they had flown Aerosonde on a 24-h flight. Its small size precluded carrying the bulk of a satellite data link for communicating while over the horizon from its ground station, which was for most of its flight, so it had to be capable of thinking for itself during long periods of isolation. By early 1998, they had it execute a completely autonomous flight, including its takeoff and landing. With...
