Lockheed Martin RQ-3 DarkStar

The RQ-3 DarkStar, known during development as Tier III Minus, was a stealthy high-altitude endurance unmanned aerial vehicle built in the 1990s as a Department of Defense program. It was designed to slip into heavily defended airspace that the Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk could not enter without air supremacy, and it was fully autonomous: it could take off, fly to its target, run its optical or radar sensor, relay digital information to a satellite and land with no human intervention, although operators could change its flight plan by radio or satellite. Its first prototype flew on March 29, 1996, but the second flight on April 22 crashed shortly after takeoff. A more stable RQ-3A first flew on June 29, 1998 and made five flights before the program was canceled in January 1999. Three surviving airframes are held by museums in Ohio, Washington and Washington, D.C.