On the morning of August 16, 1956, an alert reached controllers at Oxnard Air Force Base, just north of Los Angeles: a rogue aircraft was headed towards the City of Angels. It was the call the pilots of the 437th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron had been waiting for their entire careers. Minutes later, a pair of fighter jets roared down the runway and streaked into the sky towards the steadily-approaching target. What followed was one of the most embarrassing and darkly hilarious incidents in the history of the United States Air Force, a comedy of errors that left a trail of destruction across southern California and revealed just how vulnerable America was in the early days of the Cold War. This is the story of the Battle of Palmdale.

The aircraft that appeared in the skies over southern California that day in 1956 was not a lumbering Soviet bomber looking to turn Los Angeles into a smoking radioactive wasteland, but something much smaller: an F6F-5K target drone. As covered in our previous video Tesla, Hollywood, and Inventing the Drone, what we now know as UAVs or “drones” started out as primitive cruise missiles before finding greater success as unmanned targets for fighter pilots and antiaircraft gunners. While some drones were purpose-built from the ground up, others were simply converted from readily-available surplus aircraft. Such was the case with the F6F-5K, an adaptation of the legendary WWII-era Grumman F6F Hellcat naval fighter. Fitted with radio control equipment and painted bright red for visibility, Hellcat drones were used by the U.S. Navy in a variety of roles, such as attacking bridges in Korea, collecting air samples after nuclear weapons tests, and as targets for prototype guided missiles like the Sperry AIM-7 Sparrow.

At 11:34 AM on August 16, an F6F-5K was launched from the Naval Air Station at Point Mugu, 30 kilometres northwest of Los Angeles, for a missile test over the Pacific Ocean. But instead of flying its intended course, the drone suddenly lost contact with its controllers and veered towards the southeast – heading straight for Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the Navy had no aircraft available that could intercept the drone; so, swallowing their pride, they called up the Air Force fighter squadron at Oxnard and informed them of the approaching threat. In response, Oxnard scrambled a pair of Northrop F-89 Scorpion aircraft to intercept. Introduced in 1950, the Scorpion was a state-of-the-art interceptor – the first post-war jet designed from the ground up to shoot down Soviet nuclear bombers. Capable of reaching speeds of 1,000 kilometres per hour and altitudes of 15,000 metres, it was equipped with a sophisticated Hughes E-6 fire control system and armed with 104 2.75-inch Mark 4 “Mighty Mouse” unguided rockets mounted in wingtip pods. Flying the first interceptor that day were First Lieutenant Hans Einstein and his radar observer, First Lieutenant Clennon Murray; while the second aircraft was manned by pilot First Lieutenant Richard Hurliman and radar observer First Lieutenant Walter Hale.

Flying at full afterburner, the interceptors caught up with the drone near Santa Paula, just northeast of Los Angeles. Cut off from radio control, the drone was flying erratically, forcing the pilots to wait until it veered over an unpopulated area before taking their shot. Slowly, the drone banked over the northern edge of the city and headed northeast over Fillmore, Frazier Park, and finally Antelope Valley. Seizing their chance, the pilots moved in for the kill. The F-89’s Hughes E-6 system allowed the rockets to be fired automatically when the target moved into the intercept radar beam, and could be set to two different modes: one for firing from behind, and one for firing from the side. As the drone was constantly turning, the pilots chose the second mode, lined up their shot, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Swinging around for another pass, they locked onto the target again, pulled the trigger and…still nothing. Thanks to a design flaw in the fire-control system, the rockets refused to launch, forcing the pilots to switch to manual firing. But, there was a problem: while the aircraft were delivered from the factory with optical gunsights, these were removed as unnecessary when the automatic fire-control system was installed. The pilots had no choice but to trust their instincts and line up their shots as best they could.

By this time, the drone had changed course back towards Los Angeles. Running out of time, one aircraft fired an initial volley of 42 rockets – all of which missed. Then the second aircraft fired. The 42 rockets passed just under the drone – some even bouncing off the bottom of its fuselage – but none exploded. As the drone approached a suburban town of Newhall, both aircraft fired another volley of 42 rockets, but once again every single one missed. Finally, as the drone veered once again in the direction of Palmdale, the pilots fired one last salvo of 30 rockets each…to no avail. Yes, over the course of the pursuit, the interceptors had fired a total of 208 rockets- over populated regions no less, and yet their target was still flying. In the end, the plucky little red drone was eliminated not by the might of the U.S. Air Force, but simple fuel starvation, spiralling earthward 11 kilometres east of Palmdale and taking out a power line before ploughing into the ground near Avenue P and disintegrating.

But the Battle of Palmdale was far from over, for the civilians on the ground now had to contend with the path of destruction wrought by the Air Force’s failed interception. Throughout the incident, Mk.4 rockets rained down on the Palmdale Area like hail, with all but 15 of the high-explosive warheads detonating on impact. The first salvo ignited a brush fire near the town of Castaic, while rockets from the second salvo set fire to oil sumps in Placerita Canyon and brush in Soledad Canyon and Santa Claritya. Over 500 firefighters were called in to tackle the blazes, which consumed over 4 square kilometres before being put out. One fire came within 100 metres of the Bermite Powder explosives factory, but was thankfully extinguished just in time.

Meanwhile, civilians throughout the Palmdale area experienced a number of harrowing close calls. As the Los Angeles Times reported:

“Edna Carlson, who lived in the home on Third Street East, said that a chunk of shrapnel from one Air Force rocket burst through the front window of her home, ricocheted off the ceiling, went through a wall and came to rest in a kitchen cupboard.”

Shrapnel from another rocket blasted through the garage of one J.R. Hingle, nearly striking a guest named Lilly Willinghann, while in Leona Valley a rocket detonated just in front of a station wagon being driven by 17-year-old Larry Kemptin and his mother Bernice. The explosion shredded the left front tire and peppered the radiator and windshield with holes, but neither occupant was injured. And in perhaps the closest call of them all, two men in Placerita Canyon had just left their truck to eat lunch under a tree when a rocket struck the vehicle and destroyed it. But the danger still wasn’t over, for 15 unexploded rockets still remained embedded in the ground, ready to go off at any moment. The Air Force circulated notices warning civilians not to approach the weapons, and with the help of the local Sheriff’s department safely detonated all 15 where they had fallen. Miraculously, despite the fires and the dozens of near-misses, no one was injured in the Battle of Palmdale.

The events of August 16, 1956 dramatically illustrated how vulnerable 1950s America was to aerial attack. Had the runaway drone instead been a fleet of Soviet bombers, the chances of the Air Force shooting down every aircraft and averting the destruction of Los Angeles would have been slim. This failure in turn revealed the glaring flaws in the E-6 fire control system and the Mk. 4 rocket, the latter of which was retired as an air-to-air weapon and successfully adapted to the ground-attack role. In its place, in 1957 the Air Force adopted a truly frightening weapon: the AIR-2 Genie, an unguided air-launched rocket armed with a 1.5 kiloton nuclear warhead that relied on its enormous blast and radiation radius to take out multiple Soviet bombers at once. While more sophisticated guided missiles like the Hughes AIM-4 Falcon and Sperry AIM-7 Sparrow soon became available, the Genie remained in service with the USAF and the Royal Canadian Air Force for decades, only being retired in 1985.

To avoid incidents like the Battle of Palmdale, today most military drones are fitted with failsafes that cause them to automatically enter a holding patten and return to base when they lose contact with their controllers. But accidents still occasionally happen. For example, on September 13, 2009, a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper attack drone on a mission over Afghanistan suffered a “lost link “ and went rogue, forcing U.S. Air Force fighter aircraft to shoot it down before it wandered out of Afghan airspace. Thankfully, such incidents are few and far in between and rarely result in injuries. It’s when rogue drones start turning around and firing back that we should really start to worry. And when that inevitably happens, I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

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