John C. Meyer shown here in his mustang  "Petie 3rd" was wing commander of 352nd Fighter Group know as "The Blue Nosed Bastards of Bodney". he was the forth leading ace in europe and the second leading ace in the p-51 mustang. he would later become the only pilot from WWII to become a four star general 

John C. Meyer

a young robin olds with his P-51D SCAT VI

robin olds 

This was yet another attempt to use an animal to deliver explosives to an enemy target. It was first proposed by American psychologist B.F.Skinner, as a way to delivering a missile accurately against a target, by placing a pigeon inside the missile. An image of the target would be projected in front of it, and the pigeon would be trained to recognize it. It would then peck on one of four levers (up, down, left or right) until the target was dead centre of the screen. They were encouraged to do so by their training, where they were awarded with corn for keeping the target in the centre. They were surprising adept at this, (in training) being able to track a target which jumped 4 or 5 inches a second on the screen. The National Defense Research Committee committed $25,000 to this research, and the army modified several missiles for this purpose before it was decided that electronic guidance would be superior, and the project was scrapped. 

