The record
The Canadair CL-89 Midge was the British Army's first battlefield reconnaissance drone, a rocket-launched, parachute-recovered aircraft carrying cameras and sensors that flew a pre-programmed course over the enemy and returned to its launch unit. Each Royal Artillery Observation Post battery's drone section needed to process and read the film within minutes of recovery, and for that the Army built a small number of Portable Photographic Interpretation Facility (PPIF) bodies on the Series IIA 109-inch chassis.
25 FG 73 shows the arrangement: the tall, square-cornered box body of the period ambulance and command-vehicle family, extended forward over the cab into a big Luton with a mesh-fronted vent panel, extra ventilation and equipment boxes on the roof for the darkroom and viewing kit inside, a spare wheel on the bonnet and a matching trailer behind. The registry model takes the ambulance body, drops its medical markings and beacon, and adds the Luton, roof boxes and plate as photographed; the trailer is not modelled.
