Fridges, radios and a drone

Tadiran was born in 1962 from the merger of two Israeli companies, Tadir and Ran, and grew into a conglomerate with a finger in almost every electronic pie: telephones and telecommunications, batteries, medical systems, refrigerators, air conditioners and military electronics. To most Israelis the name still means an air conditioner. Its subsidiaries even included a telematics arm whose military tracking technology became the Ituran stolen-vehicle service in 1994. To aviation historians, though, the name means something else entirely.

The Mastiff

In 1973, the year of the Yom Kippur War, Tadiran flew the Mastiff, a small propeller-driven drone that is widely described as the world’s first modern military surveillance drone. Its novelty was a data link and miniaturised electronics feeding live, high-resolution video to the operators, with more than seven hours of endurance. The Israel Defence Forces used three generations of it, and in the 1982 Lebanon War a Mastiff filmed Yasser Arafat. The US Navy tested it, and the Marine Corps flew it with VMUT-2 at Camp Pendleton from 1984 to 1986.

Broken up and sold off

The conglomerate did not survive in one piece. Its pieces went one by one: telecommunications into ECI Telecom in 1998, batteries to Alcatel in 2000 and then Saft, appliances to Carrier, and the military radio and electronics businesses into Elbit Systems in 2008. Tadiran Air Conditioners, Tadiran Batteries and Tadiran Telecom still trade under the old name, but there is no longer a Tadiran that builds aircraft of any kind.