The Predator team on the ground had the Al Qaeda leader in sight but kept waiting for further instructions. But by September 2000 the Predator’s cameras were able to spot Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. In May 1999 the first test flight of the Predator after it was rigged to guide bombs ended in failure. All the way from the Kettering Bug during World War II, an attempt to use a radio-controlled aircraft which sadly ended in disaster, to its first combat deployment in 1995 during the Bosnian war, unmanned aircraft have fascinated military strategists but proved to be a tough nut to crack. By the 1970s, Jane’s, the military digest had listed 120 different kinds of what were then called “remotely piloted vehicles'. The concept of pilotless planes isn’t a very recent idea. Blue was no nerd, drones then fitted into his investing credo: always buy straw hats in winter.

Then there is Neal Blue, dubbed the founding father of the drone revolution, who put his faith in these unmanned vehicles back in 1990 when there was simply no market for them.

It was his initial work in his lab in Los Angeles that eventually provided the technological underpinning for the drone revolution. He went on to work as director of preliminary design at the government-owned Israel Aircraft Industries conceptualizing a glide decoy as a solution to Israeli reverses in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. As a boy he had read every magazine and newspaper article, every scholarly paper that was related to anything to do with flight. There is Abe Karem, born in a Jewish family in Baghdad and a born engineer. But while this surprisingly racy thriller is ostensibly about the origins and evolution of drones, the narrative is about the many men and women whose paths crossed in strange ways culminating in its use during the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Predator by richard whittle