Mil Hist – Battle of Palmdale

Palmdale is one of few Southern California communities to have suffered through an air-launched rocket attack. Though inadvertent, the attack came in the summer of 1956 when U.S. Air Force fighters were scrambled to shoot down an out-of-control Navy drone that threatened to fall on Los Angeles. Instead of downing the drone, a pair of Air Force fighter-interceptors blasted holes in the desert from Castaic to Palmdale, starting fires, damaging homes and perforating a station wagon rolling along Palmdale Boulevard. None of the 208 unguided Mighty Mouse air-to-air rockets fired by the interceptors hit their target.. Instead, the drone eventually ran out of fuel and crashed of its own accord near Avenue P and 110th Street East after snipping three power lines.

Aerospace archaeologist Peter Merlin, born after the incident, offered an account of the 47-year-old misadventure. “Following World War II, a number of Grumman F6F Hellcats were converted to target drones,” Merlin said. “On Aug. 16, 1956, one of these radio-controlled Hellcats was launched by the Navy from Point Mugu as a target for a missile test.

“The Hellcat took off at 11:34 a.m., climbing out over the Pacific. As controllers attempted to maneuver the drone toward the target area over the ocean, they realized it was not responding to radio commands,” Merlin said. The drone had thousands of square miles of ocean in which to crash, but instead, “it made a graceful climbing left-hand turn to the southeast, toward Los Angeles,” he said.

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