The Reason Unmanned Aircraft are Called “Drones”

Drone cameras seem to have come out of nowhere in recent years to take the tech world by storm. (And we won’t even get into the supposedly unexplained drones apparently flying all over the skies in the United States.) But why are these hovering, propellor-powered cameras—and, for that matter, all other uncrewed remote-controlled aircraft—known as drones?

1. The Meaning of Drone: From Bees to UAVs
2. Other Influences on Drone
3. A Drone by Any Other Name

The Meaning of Drone: From Bees to UAVs

The word drone is an ancient one, dating back to the early Old English period. Its first meaning was entomological: a drone is a male bee, whose only purpose in the hive is to mate with the queen and thereby help to secure the future of the colony. Unlike the smaller and more numerous worker bees, drones are not involved in making honey nor in the defense or maintenance of the hive; mating is their only task, and once that task is complete, they perish. In fact, drones are so surplus that any that fail to mate with the queen by the end of the summer are unceremoniously ejected from the hive by the workers and left to die.

Based on the original meaning, in the early 1500s, drone also began to be applied more figuratively to anyone who did little productive work or was forever mindlessly engaged in the same dull, repetitive task.

But of these two meanings, it was the former that led to the very first unmanned military flying vehicles, or RPVs (“remotely piloted vehicles”), becoming known as drones in the mid-1930s. The name helped to emphasize the fact that these early remote-controlled aircraft had no mind of their own, and were merely sent to do a job by controllers on the ground.

Now, when we hear the word drone, often the first thing that comes to mind isn’t bees but “any powered aerial vehicle that does not carry a human operator on board,” as FlyingMag.com puts it.

Other Influences on Drone

There are some footnotes to this origin, however. The word drone can also be used to mean “a low monotonous hum or moan,” or, as a verb, to produce just such a sound—like the unchanging background tone of a bagpipe. Besides the fact that it too first emerged in our language in the 1500s, no one is entirely sure where this second drone comes from, nor whether it’s related to the buzzing of a drone bee or is an entirely independent coinage. Either way, according to Merriam-Webster, there was likely at least some influence from this meaning as well when it came to naming the first drone aircraft in the 1930s, given the continuous whirr of the aircraft’s propellors.

There’s also the fact that in the 1930s, there were two early British radio-controlled aircraft with bee-related names. The de Havilland Queen Bee was developed for the British armed forces in 1933 and first flown—sans pilot—in 1935. The following year, another radio-controlled aircraft, the Drone King Bee, was demonstrated at a handful of airshows across England in a display of what news reports at the time called “another marvellous revelation of the scientific advance of flying.”

The Drone King Bee doesn’t seem to have left too much of a mark on the world of unmanned aircraft, however, and its choice of name appears to be little more than an unrelated coincidence. De Havilland’s DH82 Queen Bee, on the other hand, remained in use until 1947. As a result, some sources (the Oxford English Dictionary among them) have suggested the use of the word drone for an unmanned aircraft might also have emerged in reference to that. 

A Drone by Any Other Name

Drones are often also referred to as UAVs, which stands for “unmanned aerial vehicles”—but that’s not the only name they go by. You might also hear:

• Unmanned Aircraft (UA)
• Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA)
• Remotely Piloted Air System (RPAS) or Unmanned Aerial System (UAS), which typically refer to the aircraft and the equipment, software, and data link needed to run it
• Small UAS (sUAS) or Micro UAC, for drones weighing less than 55 pounds and 4.4 pounds, respectively

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