Air Force leaders in World War II were seasoned warriors who remembered being burdened with obsolescent aircraft after the end of World War I, when growth and aeronautical innovation were stifled by the machines of the last war.
General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold voiced his interest in expending aging B-17s as explosives-laden drones on one-way missions to Germany rather than having them accumulate just to have Congressional bean counters use the old airframes as an excuse for miserly defense budgets.
In actuality, only a handful of radio-controlled B-17s were launched against German targets in 1944 and early 1945, with primitive equipment leading to puny results.
These Fortresses relied on a two-man crew to take the bombers up over England, where a mother ship would assume control, allowing the crew to bail out of an escape hatch enlarged to hasten their departure. The bombers were on one-way missions, loaded with as much as 12 tons of explosives, and landing was not a consideration.
Later in 1945 back in the States, the Army Air Forces perfected the means of having the B-17 drone take off under remote control.
While the initial concept was to use these Fortresses as flying bombs, by early 1946, planners were asking the Air Force for drone aircraft that could capture radioactive samples from impending nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll.
The Air Force at first pondered having B-17 drones make crash landings after flying through the atomic clouds, but relatively quickly the service devised a way to safely operate an unmanned B-17 through all phases of flight, including a normal landing.
The use of unmanned B-17s migrated from one-way bombs to round-trip nuclear samplers.
By 1947, radio-controlled B-17s were being guided into the water near Eglin Air Force Base in Florida for ditching tests that provided quantification of the stresses imposed on an aircraft hitting the water.
More roles for radio-control B-17s emerged as the technologies of controlling them improved. By 1951, QB-17 drones were being shot at, and sometimes downed, by Nike antiaircraft missile crews at White Sands in New Mexico.
Not every drone sortie yielded a downed QB-17. The drones were expensive and finite in number, and those used in missile tests often received near-miss programmed passes from the missiles.
But spectacular and grainy test films showing QB-17s in death throes after a missile strike became stock footage for war movies of the era.
Various surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles were tested against the QB-17 drones at White Sands in New Mexico and at Navy facilities at China Lake and Point Mugu in California. The Air Force also used drone B-17s for a variety of tests flown from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and the last B-17 rolled out by Boeing in Seattle in 1945 ultimately met its fate as a target sent out from Patrick Air Force Base at Cape Canaveral in 1958.
The use of B-17 drones with no humans aboard enabled risky tests, like the high-altitude 1950 flight of a QB-17 over the Gulf of Mexico in which special outboard wing fuel cells were purged of oxygen by exhaust gases.
The drone B-17 carried a .50-caliber machine gun that was aimed to fire individual incendiary rounds into the gas tank to see if combustion would occur at 35,000 feet.
Evidently the first round opened a hole that allowed ambient air to enter the tank, and the next round ignited the fuel, tearing the wing off in a fiery plunge as the B-17 shot itself down.
The Air Force ran a thriving industry that used surplus and obsolete B-17s as unmanned drones and piloted drone directors for more than a decade, proving a number of antiaircraft systems and performing other missions too hazardous for human crews to be present.
When QB-17 drone operations wrapped up in 1959, the DB-17 director aircraft filtered into displays at a number of bases and communities.
The Commemorative Air Force’s brightly polished B-17G nicknamed “Sentimental Journey” survived as a DB-17 drone director before becoming a civilian firebomber.
And the B-17G “Piccadilly Lilly,” long a fixture at the Planes of Fame museum in Chino, California, owes its existence to postwar conversion to a DB-17 director. It controlled the QB-17 drone on the Air Force’s last operational B-17 mission in 1959.
Had the Air Force not used Flying Fortresses for drones, these aircraft would likely have been summarily and anonymously scrapped instead of going out in a flash of flame over test ranges, where they provided valuable research information without risking lives.
On August 12, 1944, Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., pilot and brother of future President John F. Kennedy, perished in one of the first American fatalities associated with the pilotless B-17 program.