It flew for less than three minutes and “only” hit about mach 5, but for the Huntington Beach Boeing Phantom Works team, it is a major success. Boeing, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, and the U.S. Air Force held a press briefing yesterday on the record setting hypersonic flight last week of the X-51A test flight vehicle.
The autonomous flight was supposed to last for five minutes and hit mach 6 before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. Instead, the scram jet powered flight lasted between 140 and 170 seconds and hit “just below mach 5”. Not what they were looking for, but nevertheless, “the longest ever flight of a supersonic combustion powered vehicle,” according to George Thum, X-51A Program Manager, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, builder of the engine.
The Air Force agreed. “We had a partial successful first flight of the X-51A program,” said Charlie Brink, Air Force Research Laboratory’s X-51A Scramjet Engine Demonstrator program manager. “We had anywhere between 140 and 170 seconds of very good, clean engine data. Unfortunately, as we started looking at the data coming in, something was going on with the vehicle that we still have not been able to decipher.”
Thus, the five minute flight was cut short. “At about the 200 second point from drop from the wing {of the B-52 mothership}, we loss telemetry with the vehicle and after three seconds, the vehicle was terminated,” said Brink. Nevertheless, “We hit most of our mission objectives right off the bat and we’re really pleased.”
They are pleased, at least in part, because even though the flight did not hit the endurance or speed goals, they have three more chances to test the technology. “The fact that we’ve got three more vehicles to fly, and we met almost every one of our test objectives on this first mission, is just tremendous,” said Joseph Vogel, Boeing Phantom Works/Defense, and Space & Security Director of Hypersonics X-51A program manager. “I think it gives us an opportunity—the fact that we had an anomaly—we’ll continue to work on that and we’ll make the vehicle even better.”
There might be some modifications needed to the remaining vehicles after the data from last week’s test is completely analyzed, but since Boeing’s Huntington Beach team has already built the three other vehicles for which it was under contract, Vogel is looking to the future. “Sometimes it’s bitter sweet. There is the sense that we just finished something and we need to move on and some people will be working on other projects from this point forward. That’s the bitter part of it. But the sweet part of it is anybody and everybody who has touched this vehicle in any manner, is exceedingly happy.
Although the government has not contracted for any more vehicles, Vogel continued “the fact that we were successful, says that we will move forward and likely build more of these at some time.”
Not only that, but Vogel suggested that the remaining X-51A’s could achieve even higher speeds than the original goal of mach 6. “Data collected is indicating that we would have made our speed if not even faster,” he said. “So, we’ll go forward, we’ll fix the problem, and chances are we’ll fly the vehicle even better.”
The Air Force is also looking for more from this technology. “To put this in context, for fifty years the United States—a broad brush range of the scientific community—has been after trying to get supersonic combustion ramjets to work. Because if they could, their application to the warfighter is really transformational. We could have in the future, such things as hypersonic weapons that fly 600 nautical miles in ten minutes,” said Air Force Program Manager Brink.
Of course, even if the Air Force decides to buy more of these test vehicles, there are always those corporate suits to think about. “What it really does for us here in Huntington Beach, is that it shows the Boeing Company that we do have the skills and the ability to do this kind of high tech work. That will afford us future opportunities that we might not otherwise have gotten. So I look forward to doing this kind of work for a long time to come and that we will do that based on this success,” concluded Boeing’s Huntington Beach program manager, Joseph Vogel.
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About Dolores Barr, Publisher
Dolores Barr has lived in Rossmoor since 1992 and has created this site to provide local news for the people of Los Alamitos, Seal Beach, Rossmoor, Leisure World, Sunset Beach, and Surfside, California. My husband and I have had two students graduate from the Los Alamitos Unified School District and currently our Grandson, Ricky Apodaca, grade 3 at Weaver Elementary, is actively involved in youth baseball through LAYB and youth football through FNL.
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