Spies That Fly (review)

Spies in the Sky, a 2002 episode of the PBS television series Nova, explores the origins and early history of remotely piloted reconnaissance aircraft. Its main narrative thread begins with Israeli operations over Lebanon's Bekka Valley in 1982 and ends with American operations over Afghanistan in 2001. It is, however, less a story about combat than a story about successive attempts to find a technological fix for a difficult military problem.

The problem—as the film's opening segments explain in some detail—was simple to state: how to acquire detailed, timely photographic intelligence over hostile territory. Piloted aircraft, like the U-2s whose cameras revealed Soviet missile sites in Cuba, were flexible but increasingly vulnerable to surface-to-air missiles. Satellites were immune to missiles, but incapable of lingering over a promising target and difficult to reroute on short notice. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were conceived in the 1960s as a third solution, one that provided the flexibility of a piloted aircraft without putting a pilot's life at risk. Making that "third way" work, however, proved to be more difficult than it appeared. The first American UAV, the jet-powered Lightning Bug of the 1960s, cost enormous amounts of money and delivered mediocre results. It took fifteen years before Israel fielded the first modern UAV: a small, radically simple, highly robust machine driven by a propeller and powered by a two-stroke engine.

American designers expanded on the Israeli approach to UAV design in two distinct ways, and Spies That Fly chronicles both. The first thread traces the evolution of "full-size" UAVs from the ship-launched Pioneer used in the Gulf War through the turn-of-the-century Predator to the long-range, high-endurance Global Hawk used tested in Afghanistan. The second explores a series of attempts to build small UAVs like the Dragonfly (a modular design that can be disassembled and carried in a suitcase) for use by units in the field. Both are illustrated with a rich variety of visuals: computer animation, interviews with military experts, and live-action footage of training exercises and combat operations, including a UAV-directed attack on enemy vehicles in Afghanistan.

Keeping with the film's origins as an episode of Nova, the filmmakers focus on design and operational challenges rather than military applications. Some of its most interesting moments involve ongoing attempts to understand the dynamics of insect flight, in order to design insect-sized, flapping-wing UAVs for use inside buildings. To its credit, Spies That Fly emphasizes the difficulty of such work and the high failure rate for experimental UAVs. This warts-and-all treatment is a welcome departure from the credulous "gee whiz!" tone that frequently creeps into television documentaries on military technology. Reissued as part of a four-disc boxed set that includes Nova episodes on Soviet jet fighters and the U. S. Air Force's new Joint Strike Fighter, Spies That Fly is being marketed to viewers interested in exotic airplanes and recent military history. It is also, however, a finely crafted miniature case study in the history of a cutting-edge technology.