Founded by T. Claude Ryan in 1934, part of Teledyne from 1969 and purchased by Northrop Grumman in 1999, Ryan Aeronautical company has designed, developed and built some of the most innovative and successful unmanned aerial vehicles, the most famous of those is the Ryan BQM-34 Firebee.
Ryan was a pioneer in aircraft, missiles and unmanned targets, and a photo gallery made available on Flickr by the San Diego Air & Space Museum archive provide a detailed account of the development of the early UCAVs (Umanned Combat Aerial Vehicles) from the desing phase, to the deploymnet in southeast Asia including some rare images of the early sketches, experimental types and testing activities with A-6, F-18 and F-4.
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Below you can find a very small selection of images edited by Scott Mahew (thanks for the heads-up!).
The remaining +3,200 images (covering also the Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh, the ST, PT and Brougham series of aircraft) can be found here.
All images: Ryan Aeronautical via San Diego Air & Space Museum archive
