A reactor safe enough for an idiot

In the summer of 1956 a newly founded company in San Diego gathered a few dozen nuclear scientists, many of them veterans of the Manhattan Project, and asked them what kind of reactor the world might actually buy. Edward Teller argued for one that was safe by its very physics. Freeman Dyson worked out the mathematics. The result was TRIGA, a research reactor that could be pulsed to thousands of megawatts and settle itself down again, and 66 of them were eventually installed in 24 countries. The company was General Atomics, and for its first three decades it had nothing whatsoever to do with aircraft.

Oil companies and a $60 million bargain

General Atomics began on 18 July 1955 as a division of General Dynamics, led by the Vienna-born physicist Frederic de Hoffmann, who had worked with Teller at Los Alamos. It dabbled in the extraordinary, including Project Orion, a scheme to push a spaceship along with a rapid chain of nuclear explosions. Then it was passed around the oil industry: sold to Gulf Oil in 1967, half-owned with Shell from 1973, swallowed by Chevron in 1984. In 1986 Chevron sold it to two Colorado brothers, Neal and Linden Blue, for a reported $60 million.

The garage in California

The Blues were not ordinary buyers. As Yale students they had flown a light aircraft around Latin America and the Caribbean, and in 1961 Linden was forced down in Havana and jailed for 12 days, just before the Bay of Pigs. Linden had run Beech Aircraft. They wanted a cheap, long-endurance unmanned aircraft, and they found the man who could build one in a bankruptcy court. Abraham Karem, born in Baghdad and raised in Israel, had founded Leading Systems in his California garage in 1979 and built the Amber drone for DARPA. When Congress cut the funding, the company collapsed. In 1990 General Atomics bought its assets and hired Karem and his team.

Predator goes to war

The Gnat 750 came first, flying in 1989 and selling, intriguingly, to Turkey and to the CIA, which sent one to Albania in 1994 to watch the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Its bigger descendant, the Predator, first flew on 3 July 1994 and was over the Balkans within a year. On 16 February 2001, over a Nevada range, a Predator fired a Hellfire missile into a tank. Within eight months armed Predators were hunting over Afghanistan, and on 23 December 2002 an Iraqi MiG-25 shot one down after the drone fired a Stinger back at it: the first air combat between a manned jet and a drone.

The Reaper and the price of fame

The Predator B, which the US Air Force named Reaper, first flew on 2 February 2001 with a turboprop and three times the payload. It became the most recognisable military aircraft of the war on terror, and the most controversial. A Reaper strike killed the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad airport on 3 January 2020. In March 2023 a Russian Su-27 clipped a Reaper’s propeller over the Black Sea and sent it into the water. Houthi missiles brought down a string of them over Yemen from 2017 onwards, and by 2026 the Pentagon was planning to replace the type with cheaper drones.

Loyal wingmen and a German airliner line

By July 2023 the company counted more than 1,000 aircraft produced and 8 million flight hours. It has not stood still. Since 2021 it has built the Dornier 228 utility aircraft at Oberpfaffenhofen in Bavaria, having bought RUAG’s production line, and its jet-powered YFQ-42A loyal wingman began flight testing on 27 August 2025. In June 2026 the Air Force picked it for initial production, alongside a rival from Anduril. Seventy years on, the reactor company is a privately owned weapons builder whose chairman and his brother are both now around 90.

Fabrieken

• Torrey Pines campus · San Diego, California — Headquarters since the John Jay Hopkins Laboratory was dedicated on 25 June 1959
• GA-ASI headquarters · Poway, California — Design and production of the Predator family
• Grey Butte Field · near El Mirage, California — Flight test and operations site for Predator-series aircraft
• Oberpfaffenhofen · Bavaria, Germany — Dornier 228 production line bought from RUAG in 2020

Mensen

• Frederic de Hoffmann · founder and first president — Vienna-born Manhattan Project physicist; later organised Project Orion; left in 1970 to lead the Salk Institute
• Edward Teller · physicist — Led the working group that conceived the inherently safe TRIGA reactor
• Freeman Dyson · physicist — Worked out the theory behind TRIGA
• Neal Blue · chairman and CEO since 1986 — Born 1935 in Meeker, Colorado; co-owner
• Linden Blue · vice chairman and co-owner — Former CEO of Beech Aircraft; jailed in Cuba for 12 days in 1961 after a forced landing
• Abraham Karem · drone designer — Baghdad-born founder of Leading Systems, whose assets GA bought in 1990; designer of the Predator
• Thomas J. Cassidy Jr. · first president of GA-ASI — Retired US Navy rear admiral; led the aircraft business from 1993 to 2010

Records en primeurs

• First firing of a Hellfire missile from an unmanned aircraft, 16 February 2001
• First air combat between a manned jet and a drone, when an Iraqi MiG-25 shot down a Predator on 23 December 2002
• Longest declassified Predator flight: 40 hours 5 minutes
• MQ-1 series passed 1 million flight hours in April 2010
• First MQ-9B flew more than 48 consecutive hours and crossed the Atlantic in just over 24 hours in July 2018
• Predator-family fleet passed 8 million flight hours in July 2023