Tag: Lockheed Martin

NASA’s X-59 Supersonic Aircraft Will Fly This Year

Aviation International News reported NASA confirmed that the X-59 supersonic aircraft “will fly this year and be tested over about a nine-month period with initial trials proving performance and safety. Once concluded, Lockheed Martin will formally hand over the aircraft to NASA, a milestone anticipated in 2024.” NASA said that the “program will then enter ‘Phase 2’ under which NASA flies the aircraft within the supersonic test range over NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center and Edwards Air Force Base in California to prove that the supersonic technology works as designed and that the aircraft is safe for operations in the National Airspace System. The third phase of the program is set to kick off in 2025 and run through 2026, involving flight trials over several U.S. cities. This is when the data collection will occur.”
Full Story (Aviation International News)

DOD Resumes Acceptance of F-35s from Lockheed Martin

FlightGlobal reports that on March 14, the F-35 Joint Program Office said that the Defense Department has “resumed acceptance of F-35 aircraft from Lockheed [Martin].” Breaking Defense reports JPO spokesman Russ Goemaere said, “The Defense Contract Management Agency and F-35 Joint Program Office resumed acceptance of F-35 aircraft today from Lockheed Martin and are currently working with the U.S. services, partner nations and foreign military sales customers on the movement of aircraft to their operational units. … Prior to acceptance, the aircraft passed extensive technical and flight worthy checks ensuring their readiness for operational use.” Air Force Lt. Gen Mike Schmidt, the program executive officer for the JPO, said in a statement that the “Government and industry team worked tirelessly on this effort and their work demonstrates true professionalism and a devotion to accomplish complex missions with stringent ingenuity. The safety of our warfighters is always our highest priority.”
Full Story (FlightGlobal) | More Info (Breaking Defense)

NASA, Lockheed Expect X-59 Quesst Aircraft to Make First Flight This Year

FlightGlobal reported that NASA “now expects its delayed X-59 Quiet Supersonic Technology (Quesst) demonstrator aircraft will make first flight in 2023 following completion of still-outstanding system evaluations.” The government agency, with partner Lockheed Martin, “confirm the 2023 first-flight target.” However, one industry advocacy group is calling on NASA to review the X-59 program “on ground that its conflicts with the US government’s goal of reducing aviation’s carbon footprint.”
Full Story (FlightGlobal)

NASA’s X-59 Plane to Break the Sound Barrier with No Sonic Boom

CNET News reports that NASA’s X-59 plane is attempting to break the sound barrier without the usual accompaniment of a sonic boom. At the Armstrong Flight Research Center, just outside of Lancaster, California, the space agency “is working on the X-59 QueSST (short for Quiet SuperSonic Technology) airplane – a demonstrator aircraft designed to fly faster than the speed of sound generating nothing more than a ‘sonic thump.’” Traditional supersonic aircraft “can create a sonic boom in excess of 100 decibels during flight – a problem that led the US Federal Aviation Administration to ban commercial supersonic flight over land in 1973.” But the X-59 “has been shaped to minimize the shock waves that cause a sonic boom midflight, reducing its sound at ground level to 75 decibels.”
Full Story (CNET News)

NASA Conducting Research Flights with Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft

Aviation Today reports that NASA pilots and researchers “began conducting research flights with the Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft, or SARA, in March. The system uses Sikorsky’s MATRIX Technology that is designed to enable operators to autonomously fly any aircraft, or to fly an aircraft as an optionally piloted vehicle.” The pilots and researchers “performing these flight tests are part of NASA’s Integration of Automated Systems (IAS) effort within the Advanced Air Mobility National Campaign program.” NASA’s team has partnered with Sikorsky and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to start a “new series of flight test campaigns in the past couple of weeks to continue exploring autonomous technologies.” The “new test flights involve determining how well the SARA platform can interpret a flight path’s four-dimensional trajectories into primitive commands and then follow those commands.”
Full Story (Aviation Today)

Supersonic Passenger Flights May Return

CNET News reports that a few companies are considering bringing back supersonic passenger flights. In 2021, United Airlines “agreed to buy 15 aircraft from Boom Supersonic, a startup working to build supersonic commercial jets. United is aiming to get those planes in the air by 2029.” Virgin Galactic and Rolls-Royce announced a partnership in 2020 to develop the X-59 aircraft, a quieter supersonic jet.
Full Story (CNET News)

Lockheed Martin Releases Video on NASA X-59 Supersonic Jet

SPACE reports on a video released on YouTube by Lockheed Martin about “NASA’s new X-59 supersonic jet” in which engineers “talked about the work of the forthcoming quiet supersonic flyer.” The video “opens with an incredible timelapse showing the jet coming together within view of a large team of technicians, seeking to make supersonic flight more silent than ever before.” NASA hopes to test the jet “over several communities in the United States starting in 2024.”
Full Story (SPACE)
 
 
 

 

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Supersonic X-59 Continues to Progress in CA

X-59 Supersonic Aircraft Arrives at Palmdale for Assembly

SPACE reports that NASA’s new “X-59 supersonic jet arrived this month at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale for assembly, ahead of a flight test expected this year.” NASA said April 18, “With its return to California, the X-59 will undergo further ground tests as it approaches full completion of its development and continues to make progress on its way to first flight.”
Full Story (SPACE)

Lockheed Martin Says UAV Made Record-Breaking Endurance Flight

FlightGlobal reports that Lockheed Martin “says a specially configured Stalker unmanned drone successfully completed a continuous endurance flight of 39h, 17min.” If certified “by the Switzerland-based World Air Sports Federation which governs aviation records, the flight would represent the longest ever by an aircraft weighing between 5kg and 25kg.”
Full Story (FlightGlobal)