Surrender to a drone

During the 1991 Gulf War a small unmanned aircraft launched from the battleship USS Wisconsin flew over Failaka Island, off Kuwait, just after USS Missouri had shelled the trenches there. Iraqi soldiers on the island were seen surrendering to the drone overhead, and when the Navy offered the Smithsonian a Pioneer, curators asked for that very airframe. The Pioneer had been developed jointly by AAI Corporation and Israel Aircraft Industries, an upgraded IAI Scout chosen after AAI won a competitive fly-off in 1985, and it served the US Navy, Marines and Army from 1986 to 2007.

Aircraft Armaments, Inc.

AAI was founded in August 1950 as Aircraft Armaments, Inc. by six aviation and defence professionals, and took the AAI name in the late 1950s. Its parent became United Industrial Corporation, which had begun as the Hayes Body Corporation. The firm has made test equipment used by every branch of the US military, maintenance trainers for the F-22 and F-35 and, between 1994 and 2004, in a venture with Skoda, 330 trolleybuses for San Francisco and Dayton. In 2006 it bought Aerosonde of Australia, and in 2007 Textron bought United Industrial for about 1.1 billion dollars.

The Shadow years

AAI’s best-known aircraft is the RQ-7 Shadow, a twin-boom pusher fired from a trailer-mounted catapult and caught by arresting gear. The Army selected the Shadow 200 in late 1999. Each system has four aircraft and needs 22 soldiers. Over Iraq and Afghanistan it flew more than 37,000 sorties, and by June 2014 Shadows had logged more than 900,000 flight hours. Australia, Italy, Sweden, Turkey and Romania bought versions. In February 2024 the US Army announced that it would replace the entire Shadow fleet.

Factories

• Hunt Valley headquarters · Hunt Valley, Maryland — Headquarters and production

Records and firsts

• RQ-2 Pioneer observed Iraqi troops surrendering on Failaka Island, 1991; that airframe is in the National Air and Space Museum collection