Abraham Karem

Abraham Karem (, ; born 1937) is an engineer and designer of fixed and rotary-wing unmanned aircraft. He is regarded as the founding father of UAV (drone) technology.

Biography Abraham Karem was born in Baghdad, Iraq, to a Jewish couple. His family moved to Israel in 1951, where he grew up. From an early age, he had an innate passion for aeronautics, and at the age of 14, he started building model aircraft. Karem is regarded as the founding father of UAV (drone) technology. He graduated as an aeronautical engineer from the Technion. He built his first drone, a glide decoy, during the Yom Kippur War for the Israeli Air Force. In the 1970s, he immigrated to the United States.

Engineering career In 1979, Karem founded Leading Systems Inc. in his home garage in California with engineer Jack Hertenstein, whom he had previously worked with at U.S. Aerospace company Developmental Sciences, and Jim Machin, a pre-med student whom Karem had met at a modeling meet. The Albatross gained DARPA funding for flight tests, and its exceptional performance led Leading Systems to collaborate further with DARPA to collaborate further on a more sophisticated variant of the Albatross, called Amber. Together, they built the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, which entered service in 1995 and was retired in 2018.

Karem has been described by The Economist magazine as the man who "created the robotic plane that transformed the way modern warfare is waged and continues to pioneer other airborne innovations". He is popularly referred to as the father of modern drones.

Awards and recognition In 2010, Karem was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for the development of long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles and variable rotor speed VTOL aircraft systems.