Meir Yoffe has been a relentless inventor all his career : When he saw the damages to the Israeli Air Force Skyhawk aircraft in the Yom Kippur War due to the soviet STRELLA missiles he invented the elongated tail pipe to save them; when “called to the flag”‘ of creating Israel’s first UAV system, he undertook the conceiving of the first GCS (Ground Control Station) for the IAI PIONEER UAV system. It was so successful that the US Navy personnel, Who received the PIONEER before the 1991 Gulf War, declared that ” Any other UAV system procured will be controlled thru the Israeli station”…

Aeronautical engineer in profession, Meir had the privilege of being mentored in his first years in the Air Force Engineering Branch by the renowned Abraham Karem, who later invented the US most successful UAV – the PREDATOR. Karem led the jet fighter replacement program (1968-1971) that led to the successful KFIR jets, the precursors of Israel’s LAVIE fighter, therefore Meir belongs to a distinguished ‘family of inventors’.

The spirit instilled in him early in the Israeli Air Force service (1965-1972) brought Meir to lecture in the Tel Aviv University’s Business Administration School on “Encouraging Creativity in Technical Organizations” which, according to his students’ suggestion, triggered in him writing a book on his model of the engineers creativity encouraging (still not in print).

As early as 1986 Meir applied for his first patent on recovery of UAVs to small ships (USPTO # 4790497) when he worked in IAI’s MBT plant becoming aware of the critical importance of over the horizon observation to ships. Recently, with the world success of UAVs, seeing that still very few are at sea, he renewed and improved his patent (PCT# WO 2013/171735A1).

In between all, Meir had another invention, this one solving for the missing external stores of the US F-22 fighter, has been a private pilot, has 5 grandchildren , and , now retired, he plans to develop his UAV recovery to ship commercially, relying on US DOD DARPA that it seems recognized his inventive recovery in its TERN program announced March 2013.