Nation: The Firebee

Communist China held an official ceremony celebrating a “major victory” in the shooting down of “a pilotless, high-altitude reconnaissance military plane of U.S. imperialism” over Central-South China. The U.S. reaction was a classic “Who, me?” The widely known fact was that the Chicoms, for once, were not lying.

The U.S. has indeed been conducting intensive aerial reconnaissance over South China, North Viet Nam and the Laotian panhandle—where two U.S. jets were downed last week by Communist fire (see THE WORLD). All these neighborhoods would be staging areas for troop concentrations if the Viet Nam war were to escalate.

The pilotless plane the Chinese shot down almost certainly was a Ryan Fire-bee flown out of South Viet Nam. The Ryan Aeronautical Co. of San Diego has sold some 2,000 such aircraft to the Defense Department. With a 12-ft. 10-in. wingspan, the Firebee can fly at a maximum altitude of 61,000 ft., attains speeds of up to 633 m.p.h., and can stay up for an hour and a half. It is launched from a mother ship, generally a Lockheed C-130 Hercules, from a distance up to 200 miles away from the target area. The mother ship maintains line-of-sight radar surveillance, hovers around until the drone has taken its pictures and, with the help of its preset inertial guidance system, returns and parachutes or is guided to a soft landing. The Firebee is mostly used as a target drone, but, as the Ryan company itself points out in a brochure, it is “a stable platform and can house surveillance cameras.”