Washington, May 27: The US Air Force has test launched a hypersonic cruise missile, with the vehicle accelerating to Mach 6 before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, officials said.
The Air Force said the test flight of the X-15A Waverider lasted more than 200 seconds, the longest ever hypersonic flight powered by scramjet propulsion. The previous record was 12 seconds in a NASA X-43 vehicle.
“We are ecstatic to have accomplished most of our test points on the X-51A’s very first hypersonic mission,” Charlie Brink, program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
“We equate this leap in engine technology as equivalent to the post-World War Two jump from propeller-driven aircraft to jet engines,” he said yesterday.
But about 200 seconds into the flight, “a vehicle anomaly occurred and the flight was terminated,” the Air Force said in a statement.
–PTI