Silver-zinc batteries as source-primary electric power for pilotless aircraft

THE design of a pilotless aircraft electric system must be approached in a far different manner than for a piloted airplane. The pilotless aircraft has nobody to substitute for inoperative motors, relays, or servo systems. Each component in the aircraft system must operate properly or the result very likely is an aborted mission. Also, at the speeds and accelerations encountered in pilotless aircraft, a tremendous amount of energy is expended to get each pound of equipment to its destination, thus an ever-increasing premium is placed on component weight. To achieve the conflicting requirements of high reliability and light weight with equipments either available or within reach of reasonable development time and efforts, the system depicted by Fig. 1 was designed and developed.