Target drone

Around the same time during World War II, an American manufacturer named the Radio Plane Company also produced, yeah, radio planes.

Cheap, lightweight, radio-controlled target drones for use, again, in training.

If you listened to the Lions Led by Donkeys episode on Operations Aphrodite and Anvil, You'll recall that the US Air Force and Navy, respectively, had both experimented with converting retired aircraft into remote-controlled bombs loaded with explosives to be flown into high-value targets like German U-boat pens and factories producing the Nazis' deadly V-1 and V-2 rocket systems.

You can listen to Lions to learn how that endeavour went.

And supposedly, they did build a small number of them which had been fitted with a downward-facing video camera so they could be used for reconnaissance missions.

And this is an innovation which prefigured the next phase in the drone's evolution.

Moving into the 1950s, the US did continue producing a number of target drones, but when it came to the subject of pilotless aircraft, their energies were mostly dedicated to guided missiles like the V-1 and the V-2.

Because for things like reconnaissance and surveillance, they had the state-of-the-art U-2 spy plane.