aurora experimental aircraft

SR-91 Aurora: The U.S. Military's Secret Mach 5 Plane?

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The U.S. military has had dreams of hypersonic platforms for many years now with China and Russia racing to make those dreams into reality. But did a Mach 5 plane already exist years ago and we knew nothing about it? Meet the SR-91 Aurora.

The U.S. military has had dreams of hypersonic platforms for many years now with China and Russia racing to make those dreams into reality. But did a Mach 5 plane already exist years ago and we knew nothing about it? Meet the SR-91 Aurora: 

Rumors of a classified hypersonic aircraft known as  Aurora  have permeated aviation circles since the 1980s, but evidence of this triangular jet remains as sparse as ever. Could it be possible that the United States not only managed to develop and operate a fleet of Mach 5+ aircraft in the 1980s but has continued to keep them a secret to this day? The truth may actually be a bit more complicated than you might think.

Still commonly referred to as “Black Programs,” the Pentagon has a long history of funding the classified development of advanced technologies. Today, the most secretive efforts fall under  Special Access Programs  or SAPs, which limit the distribution of information even among those with the highest level of security clearances. Even some acknowledged SAPs are never fully revealed, even years after completion, and some SAPs are never acknowledged at all.

After pouring over historic media reporting, declassified documents, eyewitness accounts, and more forum posts than you could photograph from the U-2, it seems  extremely  unlikely that the United States ever had an operational fleet of secret hypersonic aircraft…  but that doesn’t mean  something like it  never darkened the massive hangar doors at Area 51 .

It’s important to remember that there’s a wide margin between technology that’s sufficiently mature and reliable to mass-produce and put into combat operations, and cutting-edge tech that may be within reach, but just isn’t sustainable from an economic, resource, or even political standpoint.

Put simply, the iPhone in your pocket is not the most advanced smartphone technology in the world today, even if it’s the latest phone to hit the market. It’s simply the technology that could be mass-produced for a target price point and consumer. The actual latest and greatest communications tech would undoubtedly cost exponentially more, may potentially be unreliable, and might even blow your mind.

Aircraft programs can progress in a similar fashion: You may be able to  build  an incredible aircraft for $2 billion… but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can kick start a production line for them the following week. Technology demonstrators, prototypes, and small-batch production of exotic aircraft are not only  believed  to be commonplace in restricted facilities like Lockheed Martin’s Palmdale plant or the fan-favorite Area 51… it’s a  verifiable fact .

Sometimes efforts don’t produce the intended outcome. Sometimes they prove too expensive or maintenance-heavy to be palatable. And sometimes… America’s secrets literally get buried in the desert, never to be spoken of again.

SR-91 Aurora was born out of a strategic need for airborne reconnaissance

Lockheed’s SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest jet-powered aircraft in history, famously outran more than 4,000 missiles during its service life as a reconnaissance platform. Its ability to reach and maintain speeds in excess of Mach 3 for hours at a time made it all but impossible to stop using even the most advanced surface-to-air missile systems or highest-flying intercept fighters. So, when the Air Force opted to retire the immensely successful (and equally expensive) SR-71 in the late 1980s, most people simply assumed it was because the U.S. already had an  even faster and higher flying replacement in the works.

That assumption wasn’t without merit. Within the secretive halls of the Pentagon and Congress, there was ample discussion about a replacement for the Blackbird. Now, decades later, irrefutable facts have been twisted around hypothetical narratives so intrinsically that attempting to investigate the truth behind Aurora will inevitably lead you down a winding corridor of references to countless  other  real or imagined classified programs, including some that may continue to this very day.

Aurora, after all, has always been rumored to be a triangular  hypersonic  aircraft reminiscent of reports of Lockheed Martin’s own  SR-72 program that the firm heavily touted prior to the onset of the modern hypersonic arms race.

Although satellites were already proving incredibly useful for intelligence gathering at the time, there remained a need for airborne reconnaissance following the retirement of the SR-7,1 just as there remains a need for it today. In fact, the SR-71 was  un-retired for a time in the 1990s to meet the nation’s reconnaissance needs. In thee minds of many, the Air Force simply wouldn’t let the SR-71 go without a worthy successor already warming up on the sideline. And they could have been right to some extent.

Evidence of the SR-91 Aurora as a technology demonstrator

There  is  some evidence to suggest that an extremely fast aircraft was undergoing testing during the timeframe often associated with Aurora.

On two separate occasions in April of 1992 (the 5th and 22nd, respectively), a journalist named Steve Douglass was monitoring military aircraft channels in Southern California when he picked up some very unusual radio chatter. According to Douglass, an aircraft with the callsign “Gaspipe” was coordinating with air traffic controllers out of the nearby Edwards Air Force Base, and based on what he heard, the jet must have been flying at extreme altitude  and  speed.

“You’re at sixty-seven thousand [feet], eighty-one miles out,” the controller told the pilots, before continuing a moment later. “Seventy miles out, thirty-six thousand. Above glide slope.”

Coming in from 67,000 feet eliminated practically all of America’s fixed-wing assets save for the SR-71 and U-2, both of which were confirmed not to be flying on the days Douglass recorded the radio transmissions. Longtime  Aviation Week and Space Technology  Editor William B. Scott analyzed Douglass’ recordings for the  Smithsonian Magazine  in 2010 and felt confident that they were indeed real, suggesting the Air Force was  either  lying about the Space Shuttle secretly landing at Edwards in 1992 or “Gaspipe” had to be some kind of high-speed classified aircraft.

In August of 1992, Bill Sweetman and others from the well-regarded  Jane’s Defense Weekly , a defense magazine, revealed that seismologists from the United States Geological Survey had been recording tremors near the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California that were in keeping with a sonic boom from a high-altitude supersonic aircraft. Notably, these events always took place on Thursday mornings at about 7 a.m. Douglass’ recorded radio chatter, however, came on a Sunday and a Wednesday

“All I can say is that it’s something that’s traveling through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound in a generally northeasterly direction,” Jim Mori, a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey at Caltech, told the LA Times  in 1992.

Sweetman contended that the nature of the reported sonic booms wasn’t in keeping with any known aircraft in American hangars.

“It’s too fast for any aircraft that we know about,” he said.

Sweetman believed the sonic booms might have been coming from a classified aircraft being tested out of Groom Lake, more commonly known as  Area 51 , though the Air Force denied it at the time.

Just a month prior to the Jane’s report, however, another reputable aviation outlet,  Aviation Week and Space Technology , also reported on sightings of an unusual aircraft with diamond-shaped lighting seen flying in formation with two F-117 Nighthawks and a KC-135 refueling tanker near Beale Air Force Base in northern California. According to the eyewitness reports in  Aviation Week , the unusual aircraft quickly turned off its exterior lighting after joining the formation, and its engine  gave off  a distinct sound reminiscent of  “air rushing through a big tube.” Beale Air Force Base is quite a bit north of San Gabriel Valley (near Los Angeles) but is still only about 320 miles from Groom Lake, which would take about five minutes to cover at Mach 5.

Other reports tied to Aurora include photographs of unusual contrails dubbed “doughnuts on a rope.” Because of the peculiar look of these vapor trails, it’s been postulated that Aurora may you an advanced pulse detonation engine, but that concept doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. In 2008, the Air Force Research Laboratory built and flew the first (known) PDE aircraft, achieving just 120 miles per hour with an engine comprised of four different PDE pipes  each firing  20 times  per second . That aircraft, ironically enough, was called “ Borealis .”

In order to achieve  hypersonic  speeds, a similar PDE would have to fire literally thousands of times per second, making the distance between “doughnuts” of any sort far too small to see from the ground. (We discussed PDE technology more thoroughly in this  previous feature .) Instead, if Aurora or something similar  did  exist, a liquid-methane combined cycle ramjet or scramjet, as was posited by Sweetman in the  Washington Post   in 1992, would be much more viable.

The reports suggest the possibility that Aurora may have been a program aimed at fielding a hypersonic technology demonstrator that could later serve as the basis for an operational aircraft. However, the earliest reported sightings tied to Aurora began some three years earlier… and on a completely different continent.

Evidence of SR-91 Aurora as an operational aircraft

The 1992 reports of what seemed like a high-speed aircraft in testing in the vicinity of the now infamous Area 51 could lead one to the reasonable conclusion that Uncle Sam had something exotic flying out of Groom Lake. But a string of sightings in the U.K. beginning in 1989 offered a very different narrative. If these reports are to be believed, American sightings in 1992 weren’t of a new aircraft in  testing  at all. They were flights of an  operational aircraft  hidden from the public’s eye.

The most famous of these British sightings came in August of 1989 when a Scottish oil-exploration engineer named Chris Gibson reported seeing an isosceles triangle-shaped aircraft flying in formation with two F-111s and refueling from a KC-135 from his vantage point on an oil rig in the North Sea. Gibson wasn’t just any aviation buff, he was a trained airfield observer adept at identifying aircraft from a distance.

“I t was obvious to me that this aircraft was something ‘dodgy’. I watched the formation for a minute or two and went back inside with Graeme,” Gibson later told the Discovery Channel.

“ At the time I was writing the aircraft recognition manual and had a Danish Luftmelderkorpset Flykendingsbog in my briefcase. This is probably the best aircraft recognition book ever produced. I looked through it, but nothing matched. I then sketched what I had seen and sent this to Peter Edwards, who was a Group Officer in the ROC [Royal Observer Corps] and was also on the recognition team. “

Some eight years later, in 1997, the U.K.-based aviation magazine  Airforces Monthly  published a report claiming that an American Aurora aircraft, also referred to in the article as the Astra (Advanced Stealth Reconnaissance Aircraft or AV-6) actually crashed while taking off from Runway 23 at Boscombe Down Airfield in Amesbury, England on September 26, 1994.

Airforces Monthly  editor David Oliver claimed the story had taken two years to investigate, citing unnamed sources within the Royal Air Force among other, similarly anonymous, witnesses. According to the report, operators from Britain’s elite Special Air Service (SAS) were soon on the scene and the aircraft was covered by a tarp.

On September 28, two days later, the story alleges that an American C-5 cargo aircraft arrived at Boscombe Down to haul the wreckage, which had been stored covered in a hangar, back to the States.

When asked about the incident, both the British Ministry of Defence and the U.S. Defense Department rejected it as fiction.

SR-91: Following the money (and dispelling the rumors)

Discussion of the Aurora program for good reason invariably comes down to money. Although the United States military has the largest budget in the world by a wide margin, it also has the furthest-reaching obligations. The U.S. military assumed a significant role in the defense of Europe following the end of World War II. It also provides a stabilizing presence in shipping lanes the world over, and must continuously innovate to maintain a deterrent edge against potential opponents. As a result, even with the massive pool of money in the Pentagon’s coffers to pull from, there’s never quite  enough  to go around.

Branches must continuously make compromises in order to meet their obligations today while ensuring they’ll be able to meet any challenges that may arise in the future — often prompting difficult and even unpopular decisions about divesting portions of the  Navy’s surface fleet  or pressing the Air Force to purchase new 4th generation fighters ( like the F-15EX ) instead of modern stealth jets that are more expensive to operate. If you’re going to take a multi-billion-dollar bite out of any publicly disclosed  or  secretive line of accounting,  somebody’s  bound to notice.

And notice they have… but it seems most of the internet noticed the wrong thing.

One of the most commonly cited facts you can find about Aurora online is that the program was revealed as a $455 million line item for the production of a classified group of aircraft in a 1985 document projecting Fiscal Year 1987 expenditures.

Supposedly, the story was broken by  Aviation Week  in 1990. But after digging through the long string of citations linked to by outlets repeating the story, this doesn’t appear to be entirely accurate. The original  Aviation Week  story isn’t hosted online, but if you trace these numbers back to their earliest hosted source, you’ll find most outlets citing a teal-text-on-black-background “Aurora timeline” page listing developments associated with the alleged Aurora program. The page was taken down in 2009, but can still be accessed via an  internet archive .

The 1985 budget revelation, however, was  indeed real . Five years prior to the oft-cited  Aviation Week  story, at least two outlets covered the inclusion of Aurora in the 1985 budget proposal in real-time: the  LA Times  and the  South Florida Sun-Sentinel . Based on this contemporary reporting (as I couldn’t locate the original Defense Department document), the figures associated with “Aurora” were significantly higher than $455 million.

“The document, titled ‘procurement programs,’ indicates that the Defense Department plans to spend $80 million on the Aurora in fiscal 1986, which begins this October, and $2.3 billion in fiscal 1987.” “ Aurora Program May Involve Stealth Bomber or Fighter : Defense Document Tells of Secret Plane ” by Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times — Feb. 9, 1985

The  Sun-Sentinel  corroborated those numbers, seemingly suggesting the Pentagon had a secret program going on that was expected to cost significantly more than even the B-2 Spirit at the time, which was estimated to cost between $900 million and $1 billion annually.

But there’s still more to this story… While Aurora did appear as an expensive line item on the procurement programs document, the document  itself  was just a proposal. The following year, when the Fiscal Year 1987 National Defense Authorization Act (defense budget) was submitted to Congress for a vote, both Aurora and its multi-billion dollar expenditure  were not included . In other words, Aurora — whatever it may have been — doesn’t seem to have received a single penny.

The truth about the Aurora line item appears to have been revealed in 1994 when Ben Rich, the former head of Lockheed’s legendary Skunk Works who oversaw the development of the F-117 Nighthawk, published his book,  Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed .

According to Rich, the infamous “Aurora” line item was actually funding for America’s stealth bomber competition that Northrop ultimately won.

“The rumor surfaced that it was a top-secret project assigned to the Skunk Works – to build America’s first hypersonic airplane,” Rich wrote (with co-author Leo Janos).

“That story persists to this day even though Aurora was the code name for the B-2 competition funding. Although I expect few in the media to believe me, there is no code name for the hypersonic plane, because it simply does not exist.”

Congressional approval to move ahead with the production of the B-2 Spirit came in 1987, seemingly substantiating Rich’s sentiment, though it seems unlikely that the money was meant for competition. According to a  1995 report  from the Government Accounting Office on B-2 procurement, it was around this period of time that the B-2 program was forced to shift priorities.

“At about the same time, the B-2’s mission emphasis was changed from being principally a strategic bomber capable of delivering nuclear weapons to a conventional bomber capable of delivering precision-guided munitions.” “ B-2 BOMBER: Status of Cost, Development, and Production ,” United Staes Government Accounting Office – August 4, 1995

Because the 1987 budget didn’t ultimately include Aurora, nor did the total budget indicate the $2.3 billion had simply been shifted into another program or distributed across a number of them, it seems the cost may have been anticipated but largely worked around — but not without some degree of headache. According to the same 1995 document, there were pressing concerns that the B-2 would not be ready for service by 1997, with that shift in emphasis cited as one of the problems.

“Test progress has been slower than planned. The test program is planned for completion in July 1997, but our analysis of the tests to be completed and the time that may be needed to complete them indicates that completion by July 1997 is optimistic.”

“The change in emphasis on the B-2 mission from nuclear to conventional increased the need to integrate precision conventional weapons into the B-2 aircraft.” “ B-2 BOMBER: Status of Cost, Development, and Production ,” United Staes Government Accounting Office – August 4, 1995

This isn’t enough to conclude for certain that the Aurora line item on the 1985 document was meant to address concerns about changes to the B-2’s role, but it seems evident that it  wasn’t  aimed at funding a classified hypersonic strike or reconnaissance aircraft of the same name.

So was the SR-91 Aurora real? Well… It’s complicated

It does seem  extremely  unlikely that the United States was operating a fleet of hypersonic reconnaissance or strike aircraft in the 1980s or ’90s under the name “Aurora” or anything else for that matter. It’s evident that the U.S. has continued to invest heavily into advanced propulsion systems like those long-associated with the Aurora effort. Supersonic combustion ramjets, or  scramjets , are the engine system commonly associated with Aurora, but if these systems were mature enough for operational aircraft in the 1980s, it seems  crazy  that the U.S. would dump literally billions of dollars into scramjet development for hypersonic missiles and potentially drone applications since 2016 alone.

Likewise, with a working propulsion system capable of reliably pushing an aircraft to speeds in excess of Mach 5, 6, or 8 (all speeds commonly attributed to Aurora), it also seems unlikely the Air Force would have continued investing heavily into the development of other exotic high-speed propulsion systems like Pulse Detonation or Rotating Detonation engines. Just  this week , the Air Force awarded nearly $5 billion in contracts to firms ranging from Lockheed Martin to Pratt & Whitney for the development of more powerful and efficient engines for America’s next generation of fighters.

Even with a lot of money to play with, it’s unlikely that the U.S. would continue to funnel billions into technology that’s  less advanced  than the systems it was already operating when  the original  Top Gun   was still playing in theaters.

But … and this is a pretty big  but …

There is a  significant  difference between a development program that produces technology demonstrators and an aircraft that’s put into operational service. This distinction was highlighted in 2020 when Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Will Roper, told the press that the U.S. had already built and tested “a full-scale flight demonstrator in the real world” tied to the Air Force’s  Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD)  program. Much of the media reported on it as though that meant the fighter itself was reaching developmental maturity, but a  demonstrator  needs only to  demonstrate  the function of systems… it doesn’t have to bear any resemblance to a production platform.

As Tyler Rogoway pointed out for  The War Zone , an online defense publication, Northrop’s Tacit Blue stealth technology demonstrator played a vital role in the development of the B-2 Spirit’s low-observable capabilities. But you’d never know they were related by looking at them.

In other words, while it seems entirely unlikely that the Aurora was an operational hypersonic aircraft of any kind, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t a variety of experimental aircraft, prototypes, and technology demonstrators operating out of the wind-swept airstrips of Groom Lake and being spotted in the skies over America’s Southwest. The Cold War was still alive and well in the 1980s, and the United States was still fire-hosing money into forward-reaching defense programs.

The aforementioned Tacit Blue wasn’t revealed to the world until almost a decade after its final flight. Boeing’s alien-looking Bird of Prey technology demonstrator was flying over Area 51 seven years before being revealed. It stands to reason that exotic aircraft, some so rare there may have been only a single prototype, were likely testing systems ranging from advanced propulsion to new stealth technology around Groom Lake through the entirety of both decades. It’s been widely circulated that Area 51 remains the home of a number of aircraft that have yet to be disclosed — some occupying space in hangars, and some meant never to be declassified literally  buried   in the desert  when storage space becomes limited.

With stories of an American hypersonic aircraft named “Aurora” widely circulating as early as 1985, one could argue that Chris Gibson could have seen the  real deal  four years later flying over the North Sea. Or, one might contend that the F-117, which had just been revealed to the public months earlier and remained  widely misunderstood  for years to come, could also have been the black triangle he spotted. The B-2 Spirit took its first flight just a month before Gibson’s sighting, making it  extremely unlikely  that it would cross the Atlantic… but even that seems more feasible than it being a completely  different  and somehow  hypersonic  black triangle with no trail of money or even logistics tied to it.

The fervor over the word  “Aurora ” likely provided a single catch-all term to lump sightings of a wide variety of unusual aircraft in testing over the United States into, and eventually, from elsewhere as well. Gibson, it’s worth noting, didn’t come forward with his sighting until 1992.

So, while the legend of a hypersonic aircraft called  Aurora  is likely  just that  — a legend — that’s not to say that the sightings associated with it, the exotic technologies it was claimed to contain, or the secrecy surrounding such a program are fiction as well.

Aurora may not be real… but out there somewhere, buried in the sands of Groom Lake, may lie an even greater secret just waiting to be revealed.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University. This first appeared in Sandboxx. 

The SR-91 Aurora Saga Shows How Easily a Leak Can Become an Urban Legend

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SR-91 Aurora aircraft

Aurora also known as SR-91 Aurora is the popular name for a hypothesized American reconnaissance aircraft, believed by some to be capable of hypersonic flight at speeds of Mach 5+.  According to the hypothesis,  Aurora was developed in the 1980s or 1990s as a replacement for the aging and expensive SR-71 Blackbird.

A British Ministry of Defence report released in May 2006 refers to USAF priority plans to produce a Mach 4-6 highly supersonic vehicle, but no conclusive evidence had emerged to confirm the existence of such a project. It was believed by some that the Aurora project was canceled due to a shift from spy-planes to high-tech unmanned aerial vehicles and reconnaissance satellites which can do the same job as a spyplane, but with less risk of casualties.

The main question here is, Does the US Air Force or America’s intelligence agencies have a secret hypersonic aircraft capable of a Mach 6 performance?. The continually growing evidence suggests that the answer to this question is YES. Perhaps the most well-known instance which provides evidence of such an aircraft’s existence is the sighting of a triangular plane over the North Sea in August 1989 by oil-exploration engineer Chris Gibson. As well as the famous “skyquakes” heard over Los Angeles since the early 1990s, found to be heading for the secret Groom Lake (Area 51) installation in the Nevada desert, numerous other facts provide an understanding of how the aircraft’s technology works. Rumored to exist but routinely denied by U.S. officials, the name of this aircraft is Aurora.

The outside world uses the name Aurora because a censor’s slip let it appear below the SR-71 Blackbird and U-2 in the 1985 Pentagon budget request. Even if this was the actual name of the project, it would have by now been changed after being compromised in such a manner.

The plane’s real name has been kept a secret along with its existence. This is not unfamiliar though, the F-117a stealth fighter was kept a secret for over ten years after its first pre-production test flight. The project is what is technically known as a Special Access Program (SAP). More often, such projects are referred to as “black programs.”

So what was the first sign of the existence of SR-91 Aurora ? On 6 March 1990, one of the United States Air Force’s Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spyplanes shattered the official air speed record from Los Angeles to Washington’s Dulles Airport. There, a brief ceremony marked the end of the SR-71’s operational career. Officially, the SR-71 was being retired to save the $200-$300 million a year it cost to operate the fleet. Some reporters were told the plane had been made redundant by sophisticated spy satellites.

But there was one problem, the USAF made no opposition towards the plane’s retirement, and congressional attempts to revive the program were discouraged. Never in the history of the USAF had a program been closed without opposition. Aurora is the missing factor to the silent closure of the SR-71 program.

Testing such a new radical aircraft brings immense costs and inconvenience, not just in the design and development of a prototype aircraft, but also in providing a secret testing place for an aircraft that is obviously different from those the public are aware of.

The Groom Dry Lake, in the Nevada desert, is home to one of America’s elite secret proving grounds which was Aurora’s most likely test location. Comparing today’s Groom Lake with images of the base in the 1970s, it is apparent that many of the larger buildings and hangars were added during the following decade. Also, the Groom Lake test facility has a lake-bed runway that is six miles long, twice as long as the longest normal runways in the United States. The reason for such a long runway is simple, the length of a runway is determined either by the distance an aircraft requires to accelerate to a flying speed, or the distance that the aircraft needs to decelerate after landing. That distance is proportional to the speed at which lift-off takes place. Usually, very long runways are designed for aircraft with very high minimum flying speeds, and, as is the case at Edwards AFB, these are aircraft that are optimized for very high maximum speeds. Almost 19,000 feet of the runway at Groom Lake is paved for normal operations.

Lockheed’s Skunk Works, now the Lockheed Advanced Development Company, is the most likely prime contractor for the SR-91 Aurora aircraft. Throughout the 1980s, financial analysts concluded that Lockheed had been engaged in several large classified projects. However, they weren’t able to identify enough of them to account for the company’s income.

Technically, the Skunk Works has a unique record of managing large, high-risk programs under an incredible unparalleled secrecy. Even with high-risk projects that the company has undertaken, Lockheed has a record of providing what it promises to deliver.

In 2006, renowned aviation writer Bill Sweetman had stated and derived to a conclusion that, “This evidence of 20 years of examining budget “holes”, unexplained sonic booms, plus the Gibson sighting , helps establish the program’s initial existence. My investigations continue to turn up evidence that suggests current activity. For example, having spent years sifting through military budgets, tracking untraceable dollars and code names, I learned how to sort out where money was going. This year, when I looked at the Air Force operations budget in detail, I found a $9-billion black hole that seems a perfect fit for a project like Aurora.”

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This wild DARPA CRANE X-plane could be a giant leap in aircraft design

Aurora Flight Sciences will start the detailed design of the novel, high-performance aircraft as it powers towards an X-plane demonstration flight.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) says it's time for some airplanes to drop elevators, flaps and rudders for flight control.

DARPA 's new X-plane concept will remove these moving external control surfaces to reduce aerodynamic drag and increase fuel efficiency, contradicting a century of standard aviation design practices. But the advanced-technology branch of the U.S. Department of Defense says it has a workable alternative to keep control in the air at high speeds.

Aurora Flight Sciences received a design contract from DARPA Tuesday (Jan. 17) under the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program, which seeks fly an experimental aircraft without moving joints.

The subsidiary of Boeing "will design a full-scale X-plane that relies solely on changes in air flow for in-flight maneuvers," DARPA wrote in a Tuesday tweet of Aurora's award. Should the concept succeed, officials added, the design will be "a new phase in creation of an aircraft."

Related: DARPA is exploring ways to build big things in space

Moving aircraft parts has been a necessary inconvenience for more than a century. On the one hand, control surfaces create drag and reduce fuel efficiency. Pilots, however, need to safely move the airplane around and elevators, flaps and rudders have been tried, tested and improved for decades.

DARPA is by no means the first to consider removing parts previously considered essential to flight operations. In 2018, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology flew what they called the "first-ever plane with no moving parts", but that term was referring more to propulsion. MIT used an electric charge on the plane to stay aloft, an effect known as "ionic wind" — not traditional propellers or engine turbines.

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Some aircraft of the past have done away with one or more traditional moving surfaces, however. "Tailless aircraft," for example, incorporate pitch and roll into the main wing but usually still require a rudder. Such aircraft have been around since at least the 1910s, with the now-retired supersonic Concorde aircraft as perhaps the most prominent example.

There are few details available now about how CRANE will stay stable in the air, but intriguing hints are available via a 2021 presentation by Alexander "Xander" Walan, program manager of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office.

Active flow control (AFC) uses a variety of methods such as jets of air or even electric discharges to shape or sculpt the flow of air over the aircraft, the presentation notes. DARPA seeks to use commercial parts where possible to provide affordable alternatives and to "fully explore the AFC trade space," meaning to seek technologies that could provide viable alternatives.

While no further details on AFC are available on DARPA's laconic CRANE website , the Aurora announcement suggests their design would use "modular wing configurations that enable future integration of advanced technologies" to achieve AFC. 

That's not much to go on, but in the 2021 presentation, Aurora's bid pledged to model several conceptual wing designs to find the best one. Judging from available photos, it looks like the X-plane will use a type of "coplanar joined wing", which includes two forward wings and two aft wings instead of the traditional V-shaped wing on most commercial and military aircraft.

The next portion of CRANE, known as Phase 2, will entail designing and developing the controls and flight software. It will complete with a critical design review of the X-plane. DARPA may ask for a Phase 3 to fly a 7,000-pound (3,175-kg) X-plane demonstrator with AFC technology. No financial or timeline details were released.

Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of " Why Am I Taller ?" (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter  @howellspace . Follow us on Twitter  @Spacedotcom or  Facebook .

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and Office of the Vice-President of the United States, an exclusive conversation with aspiring space tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, " Why Am I Taller ?", is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada's Carleton University and a Bachelor of History from Canada's Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science at several institutions since 2015; her experience includes developing and teaching an astronomy course at Canada's Algonquin College (with Indigenous content as well) to more than 1,000 students since 2020. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@howellspace

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DARPA takes big step forward on X-plane that maneuvers with air bursts

WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has taken a major step forward toward creating an experimental airplane that can be maneuvered without traditional ailerons or other mechanical devices, instead using short bursts of air.

DARPA announced Tuesday it had selected Aurora Flight Sciences to start detailed design of an aircraft that uses a technology called active flow control to direct it, as part of the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors, or CRANE, program. Aurora is a subsidiary of Boeing headquartered in Manassas, Virginia, that specializes in developing advanced innovative designs for aircraft and uncrewed systems.

“Over the past several decades, the active flow control community has made significant advancements that enable the integration of active flow control technologies into advanced aircraft,” CRANE program manager Richard Wlezien said in a statement. “We are confident about completing the design and flight test of a demonstration aircraft with AFC as the primary design consideration. With a modular wing section and modular AFC effectors, the CRANE X-plane has the potential to live on as a national test asset long after the CRANE program has concluded.”

A typical aircraft has mechanical components such as ailerons on its wings and a rudder and elevators on its tail that its pilot uses to control the plane’s roll, pitch and yaw.

That general principle has remained largely unchanged and guided aircraft design for more than a century, former CRANE program manager Alexander Walan said in a November 2021 interview with Defense News.

But DARPA hopes the active flow control concept, if successful, could prompt a major rethinking of how planes are built and maneuver.

Active flow control technology would use small bursts of air from a wing or other air foil surface to shift the aircraft’s position or direction. The burst itself is not pushing the wings under this concept, he said, the way a spacecraft uses thrusters to nudge it into position in orbit or during re-entry.

Instead, an active flow control burst creates something of a speedbump that alters the way air flows over the wings, which then causes the aircraft to shift.

“It’s very energy-efficient,” Walan said. “Because I’m using the natural way the air wants to move, I’m injecting just a little bit of energy into it to get a big effect out of it. We’re not actually pushing the vehicle with air, we’re using it to tailor how the air is flowing over the wing.”

The aerospace community has considered this concept for at least three decades, he said, and tried laboratory experiments and some small-scale flight demonstrations. In 2015, NASA and Boeing teamed up to successfully fly a 757 aircraft modified with a vertical tail that used active flow control technology for increased aerodynamic efficiency.

So far, Walan said, no one has tried to control an entire airplane using this technology.

If DARPA decides to move forward into the next phase, Aurora would build a full scale demonstrator with a 30-foot wingspan, and would aim to conduct flight tests in 2025. (Aurora Flight Sciences)

In recent years, he said, DARPA felt the technology — including supercomputers and advanced fluid dynamics tools, and drone aircraft that could make demonstrating active flow control much cheaper and safer than testing it on manned planes — had developed to a point where “the time was right to try to see if we could design an airplane around this.”

DARPA also had to show this technology isn’t just something that “sounds cool,” he said, but could yield tangible benefits over the traditional system.

In its Tuesday statement, DARPA said this technology could improve how aircraft fly in several ways, including by eliminating moving surfaces to control the plane, reducing drag, thicker wings for structural efficiency and increased fuel capacity, and simplified systems to improve an aircraft’s lift. Walan said in 2021 that it could also lead to lower costs and increased aircraft agility.

DARPA launched the CRANE program in 2019, and organizations such as Aurora, Lockheed Martin and the Georgia Tech Research Corporation took part in its earlier stages.

Aurora has now completed the project’s Phase 1, a preliminary design phase that yielded what DARPA described as “an innovative testbed aircraft” that successfully used active flow control in a wind tunnel test.

Aurora will now move into Phase 2 under the $42 million contract, where it will create a detailed engineering design for its plane and develop flight software and controls. This will end with a critical design review of an “X-plane” demonstrator, that will be able to fly without traditional moving flight controls on its wings or tail.

DARPA’s award also has the option to move Aurora into Phase 3 of the program, in which it would build a full-scale, 7,000-pound uncrewed aircraft that relies on active flow control for DARPA to test fly. This test aircraft would have modular wing configurations that would allow DARPA or other organizations to easily swap in advanced technologies in the future.

“Given all that we have learned about AFC and its application to tactical aircraft in prior phases of CRANE, the next step is to prove out these learnings in flight,” Graham Drozeski, Aurora’s vice president of government programs, said in a company statement. “The CRANE X-plane is designed specifically to explore the effectiveness of AFC technologies at mission relevant scale and Mach numbers.”

The company said it would build this X-plane, which would have a wingspan of 30 feet, at its facilities in Virginia, West Virginia and Mississippi, and it would fly at up to Mach 0.7. Aurora hopes to conduct flight tests in 2025.

It will be many years — if ever — before this kind of technology lands in an Air Force plane or other military aircraft. Walan said in 2021 this is an experimental project intended to show whether this kind of innovative technology can work, not to improve something already in operation.

If the concept does work, Walan said, it could be a “disruptive” technology — and even upend how future aircraft are designed.

“Because we’re DARPA, we can kind of push the envelope a little bit,” Walan said. “I don’t have to have a system out there that needs this.”

“What we’re trying to do on this program is open up the toolbox that airplane designers have, so future systems have new tools and new approaches they can take and consider,” Walan continued. “This is really the art of the possible.”

Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.

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Aurora Reveals Refined Concept For DARPA’s High-Speed VTOL X-Plane

 Doors covering the embedded lift fans are open in the vertical flight phase.

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Boeing Subsidiary Building Airplane with No Traditional Control Surfaces for U.S. Government

Darpa tapped aurora flight sciences to build the x-65, a full-scale, experimental aircraft design without movable external flight controls..

An artist’s rendering of the X-65 design being developed by Aurora Flight Sciences for DARPA and the CRANE project. [Courtesy: DARPA]

Since the Wright brothers’ first flight more than a century ago introduced wing warping , almost every aircraft manufactured has included adjustable, external control surfaces: whether they be flaps, slats, spoilers, stabilizers, rudders, elevators, ailerons, or some combination of these. 

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), a U.S. Department of Defense unit tasked with developing cutting-edge defense technology, wants to do away with all of them.

DARPA this week selected Aurora Flight Sciences—a research subsidiary of Boeing specializing in the development of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other novel aircraft systems—to build a full-scale demonstrator aircraft that can fly with no surface-level control surfaces.

The project is part of a DARPA program called CRANE, or Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors. CRANE aims to design, build, and fly an airplane with active flow control (AFC)—in lieu of control surfaces—as a key design consideration. According to DARPA , AFC technology has been explored at the component level but not as a core piece of aircraft design.

Aurora has already begun building the outlandish demonstrator, called the X-65, DARPA said Wednesday. The agency expects it to roll out in early 2025, with the first flight planned for that summer.

No Control Surfaces, No Problem

The smooth-bodied X-65’s wings look almost like mirrored Dyson fans, with large gaps separating them from the body. In fact, the aircraft uses AFC to generate force in a similar way.

For primary flight control, flaps and rudders are replaced by AFC actuators. Much like a Dyson fan, AFC technology produces jets of pressured air, shaping flows over the airplane’s surface. Effectors spread across the surface use those flows to control pitch, roll, and yaw.

“[The X-65’s] distinctive, diamond-like wing shape is designed to help us maximize what we can learn about AFC in full-scale, real-world tests,” said Dr. Richard Wlezien, program manager for CRANE.

DARPA expects the elimination of external moving parts to reduce aircraft weight and complexity, thereby improving performance. In addition, the tech could enable drag reduction, high angle-of-attack flight, simplified high-lift systems, and thicker wings for better structural stability and fuel capacity, the agency said.

The X-65 will be built initially with two sets of control actuators—traditional flaps and rudders—as well as AFC effectors on all lifting surfaces. In addition to minimizing risk in early flight testing, the control surfaces will serve as a baseline for testing. As the campaign progresses, they will be selectively shut down and replaced by AFC for primary flight control.

“The X-65 conventional surfaces are like training wheels to help us understand how AFC can be used in place of traditional flaps and rudders,” explained Wlezien. “We’ll have sensors in place to monitor how the AFC effectors’ performance compares with traditional control mechanisms, and these data will help us better understand how AFC could revolutionize both military and commercial craft in the future.”

The uncrewed X-65 will have a 30-foot wingspan and is projected to weigh more than 7,000 pounds, capable of reaching Mach 0.7 speed (about 537 mph). Its size, speed, and weight will be similar to military trainer aircraft—which means DARPA could uncover immediate AFC applications for real-world designs.

X-Planes, CRANEs, and Aurora Deals

Construction of the X-65 demonstrator represents Phase 3 of CRANE, the U.S. government’s latest X-plane project.

X-planes are a series of experimental U.S. aircraft and rockets, used mainly to test out new technologies and aerodynamic concepts. The first batch was built by Bell Aircraft Corp. (known today as Bell Textron) in the 1940s and ’50s. Since then, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Curtiss-Wright, and other manufacturers have produced X-plane designs. The most recent, designated X-66, is a transonic truss-braced wing design being developed by Boeing with support from NASA.

With CRANE, DARPA hopes to optimize AFC systems by using the X-65 to mature the technology and design processes. In addition, former CRANE program manager Dr. Alexander Walan in 2020 suggested the agency may create an AFC technology database, which could be used by future manufacturers to design safe, market-ready aircraft.

CRANE began in 2019, when DARPA requested industry participation in the initiative. For Phase 1, which focused on initial design and system requirements, contracts were handed out to Aurora, Lockheed, BAE Systems, and Georgia Tech Research Corp.

But by the time Phase 2 began in January 2023, only Aurora—which had successfully completed wind tunnel testing using a testbed aircraft equipped with AFC—was still under contract . DARPA has now picked up its option for Phase 3, which will explore how AFC can be incorporated on full-scale aircraft and be relied upon for controlled flight.

It’s unclear whether CRANE will continue beyond Phase 3, which is expected to last several years. However, the X-65 is being designed to outlast it.

“We’re building the X-65 as a modular platform—wing sections and the AFC effectors can easily be swapped out— to allow it to live on as a test asset for DARPA and other agencies, long after CRANE concludes,” said Wlezien.

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DARPA Moves Forward on X-65 Technology Demonstrator

DARPA has selected Aurora Flight Sciences to build a full-scale X-plane to demonstrate the viability of using active flow control (AFC) actuators for primary flight control. The award is Phase 3 of the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program.

In December 1903, the Wright brothers flew the world’s first fully controllable aircraft, which used wing warping to successfully achieve flight. Virtually every aircraft since then has used a system of movable, external control surfaces for flight control.

The X-65 breaks this century-old design paradigm for flight control by using jets of air from a pressurized source to shape the flow of air over the aircraft surface, with AFC effectors on several surfaces to control the plane’s roll, pitch, and yaw. Eliminating external moving parts is expected to reduce weight and complexity and to improve performance.

“The X-65 is a technology demonstrator, and it’s distinctive, diamond-like wing shape is designed to help us maximize what we can learn about AFC in full-scale, real-world tests,” said Dr. Richard Wlezien, DARPA’s program manager for CRANE.

The X-65 will be built with two sets of control actuators – traditional flaps and rudders as well as AFC effectors embedded across all the lifting surfaces. This will both minimize risk and maximize the program’s insight into control effectiveness. The plane’s performance with traditional control surfaces will serve as a baseline; successive tests will selectively lock down moving surfaces, using AFC effectors instead.

“The X-65 conventional surfaces are like training wheels to help us understand how AFC can be used in place of traditional flaps and rudders,” said Wlezien. “We’ll have sensors in place to monitor how the AFC effectors’ performance compares with traditional control mechanisms, and these data will help us better understand how AFC could revolutionize both military and commercial craft in the future.”

Here we go! Aurora has started building X-65, a full-scale aircraft for @DARPA . X-65 is purpose-designed for testing and demonstrating active flow control (AFC) at relevant scale and flight conditions. Flight testing is targeted for summer 2025. Read more: https://t.co/58L0ASrD3c pic.twitter.com/u3Ze9lWOB0 — Aurora Flight Sciences (@AuroraFlightSci) January 3, 2024

The 7,000+ pound, unmanned X-65 will have a 30-foot wingspan and be capable of speeds up to Mach 0.7. Its weight, size, and speed – similar to a military trainer aircraft – make the flight-test results immediately relevant to real world aircraft design.

“We’re building the X-65 as a modular platform – wing sections and the AFC effectors can easily be swapped out – to allow it to live on as a test asset for DARPA and other agencies long after CRANE concludes,” said Wlezien.

Aurora Flight Sciences has already started fabricating the X-plane; the X-65 is scheduled to be rolled out in early 2025 with the first flight planned for summer of the same year.

“It’s thrilling to be able to say, ‘we’re building an AFC X-plane," said Wlezien. “I came to DARPA in 1999 to work on a program called Micro Adaptive Flow Control, which help pioneer the foundational understanding of fluid dynamics that eventually led to CRANE. I left DARPA in 2003 after managing MAFC, and it’s the chance of a lifetime to come back and help see that early work come to fruition in a full-scale physical aircraft. Aerospace engineers live to see their efforts take flight.”

Aurora Begins Building Full-Scale Active Flow Control X-Plane

Aurora Flight Sciences, a Boeing company, has begun manufacturing work on a new X-plane for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program. This latest phase follows the successful completion of the critical design review (CDR) for the experimental aircraft, designated X-65.

X-65 is purpose-designed for testing and demonstrating active flow control (AFC) for multiple effects, including flight control at tactical speeds and performance enhancement across the flight envelope. The AFC system supplies pressurized air to fourteen AFC effectors embedded across all flying surfaces, including multiple wing sweeps. The aircraft is configured to be modular, featuring replaceable outboard wings and swappable AFC effectors, which allows for future testing of additional AFC designs.

Active flow control technology has the potential to replace traditional flaps and rudders, which are used to maneuver most aircraft today. AFC may deliver benefits in areas such as aerodynamics, weight, and mechanical complexity. X-65 is designed to demonstrate the benefits of AFC for both commercial and military applications.

Component tooling and part fabrication for the 30 ft wingspan, uncrewed X-plane are now underway at Aurora facilities in West Virginia and Mississippi. Plans include building the airframe at Aurora West Virginia, followed by system integration and ground testing at Aurora’s headquarters in Manassas, Virginia.

“As we move into the manufacturing phase, we are getting ever closer to fulfilling the goal of validating AFC technology and helping to open the design trade space for future applications,” said Kevin Uleck, CRANE program director at Aurora Flight Sciences. “X-65 has the potential to change the future of aircraft design. Aurora is honored to support DARPA on this groundbreaking program.”

The manufacturing phase of the program follows three years of work, across Aurora and Boeing, in design conceptualization, preliminary and detailed design, wind tunnel testing, AFC system testing, and more. The program would culminate in flight tests of the full-scale, 7000 lb. X-65 aircraft at speeds up to Mach 0.7. Flight testing is targeted for summer 2025.

Aurora Flight Sciences, a Boeing company, advances the future of flight by developing and applying innovations across aircraft configurations, autonomous systems, propulsion technologies, and manufacturing processes. With a passionate and agile team, Aurora delivers solutions to its customers’ toughest challenges while meeting high standards of safety and quality.

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• Sandboxx News Home

Was America’s Aurora hypersonic aircraft real? We get to the bottom of it

• By Sandboxx
• August 25, 2022

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Rumors of a classified hypersonic aircraft known as Aurora have permeated aviation circles since the 1980s, but evidence of this triangular jet remains as sparse as ever. Could it be possible that the United States not only managed to develop and operate a fleet of Mach 5+ aircraft in the 1980s but has continued to keep them a secret to this day? The truth may actually be a bit more complicated than you might think.

Still commonly referred to as “Black Programs,” the Pentagon has a long history of funding the classified development of advanced technologies. Today, the most secretive efforts fall under Special Access Programs or SAPs, which limit the distribution of information even among those with the highest level of security clearances. Even some acknowledged SAPs are never fully revealed, even years after completion, and some SAPs are never acknowledged at all.

After pouring over historic media reporting, declassified documents, eyewitness accounts, and more forum posts than you could photograph from the U-2, it seems extremely unlikely that the United States ever had an operational fleet of secret hypersonic aircraft… but that doesn’t mean something like it never darkened the massive hangar doors at Area 51 .

Editor’s Note: Huge thanks to our friend Rodrigo Avella for the use of his incredible Aurora artwork for this story. You can find more of his work here , or follow him on Instagram here .

It’s important to remember that there’s a wide margin between technology that’s sufficiently mature and reliable to mass-produce and put into combat operations, and cutting-edge tech that may be within reach, but just isn’t sustainable from an economic, resource, or even political standpoint.

Put simply, the iPhone in your pocket is not the most advanced smartphone technology in the world today, even if it’s the latest phone to hit the market. It’s simply the technology that could be mass-produced for a target price point and consumer. The actual latest and greatest communications tech would undoubtedly cost exponentially more, may potentially be unreliable, and might even blow your mind.

Aircraft programs can progress in a similar fashion: You may be able to build an incredible aircraft for $2 billion… but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can kick start a production line for them the following week. Technology demonstrators, prototypes, and small-batch production of exotic aircraft are not only believed to be commonplace in restricted facilities like Lockheed Martin’s Palmdale plant or the fan-favorite Area 51… it’s a verifiable fact .

Sometimes efforts don’t produce the intended outcome. Sometimes they prove too expensive or maintenance-heavy to be palatable. And sometimes… America’s secrets literally get buried in the desert, never to be spoken of again.

Aurora was born out of a strategic need for airborne reconnaissance

Lockheed’s SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest jet-powered aircraft in history, famously outran more than 4,000 missiles during its service life as a reconnaissance platform. Its ability to reach and maintain speeds in excess of Mach 3 for hours at a time made it all but impossible to stop using even the most advanced surface-to-air missile systems or highest-flying intercept fighters. So, when the Air Force opted to retire the immensely successful (and equally expensive) SR-71 in the late 1980s, most people simply assumed it was because the U.S. already had an even faster and higher flying replacement in the works.

That assumption wasn’t without merit. Within the secretive halls of the Pentagon and Congress, there was ample discussion about a replacement for the Blackbird. Now, decades later, irrefutable facts have been twisted around hypothetical narratives so intrinsically that attempting to investigate the truth behind Aurora will inevitably lead you down a winding corridor of references to countless other real or imagined classified programs, including some that may continue to this very day.

Aurora, after all, has always been rumored to be a triangular hypersonic aircraft reminiscent of reports of Lockheed Martin’s own SR-72 program that the firm heavily touted prior to the onset of the modern hypersonic arms race.

Although satellites were already proving incredibly useful for intelligence gathering at the time, there remained a need for airborne reconnaissance following the retirement of the SR-7,1 just as there remains a need for it today. In fact, the SR-71 was un-retired for a time in the 1990s to meet the nation’s reconnaissance needs. In the minds of many, the Air Force simply wouldn’t let the SR-71 go without a worthy successor already warming up on the sideline. And they could have been right to some extent.

Related: 5 secretive new warplanes the US is developing for the next big fight

Evidence of the Aurora as a technology demonstrator

There is some evidence to suggest that an extremely fast aircraft was undergoing testing during the timeframe often associated with Aurora.

On two separate occasions in April of 1992 (the 5th and 22nd, respectively), a journalist named Steve Douglass was monitoring military aircraft channels in Southern California when he picked up some very unusual radio chatter. According to Douglass, an aircraft with the callsign “Gaspipe” was coordinating with air traffic controllers out of the nearby Edwards Air Force Base, and based on what he heard, the jet must have been flying at extreme altitude and speed.

“You’re at sixty-seven thousand [feet], eighty-one miles out,” the controller told the pilots, before continuing a moment later. “Seventy miles out, thirty-six thousand. Above glide slope.” 

Coming in from 67,000 feet eliminated practically all of America’s fixed-wing assets save for the SR-71 and U-2, both of which were confirmed not to be flying on the days Douglass recorded the radio transmissions. Longtime Aviation Week and Space Technology Editor William B. Scott analyzed Douglass’ recordings for the Smithsonian Magazine in 2010 and felt confident that they were indeed real, suggesting the Air Force was either lying about the Space Shuttle secretly landing at Edwards in 1992 or “Gaspipe” had to be some kind of high-speed classified aircraft.

In August of 1992, Bill Sweetman and others from the well-regarded Jane’s Defense Weekly , a defense magazine, revealed that seismologists from the United States Geological Survey had been recording tremors near the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California that were in keeping with a sonic boom from a high-altitude supersonic aircraft. Notably, these events always took place on Thursday mornings at about 7 a.m. Douglass’ recorded radio chatter, however, came on a Sunday and a Wednesday.

“All I can say is that it’s something that’s traveling through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound in a generally northeasterly direction,” Jim Mori, a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey at Caltech, told the LA Times in 1992.

Sweetman contended that the nature of the reported sonic booms wasn’t in keeping with any known aircraft in American hangars.

“It’s too fast for any aircraft that we know about,” he said.

Sweetman believed the sonic booms might have been coming from a classified aircraft being tested out of Groom Lake, more commonly known as Area 51 , though the Air Force denied it at the time.

Just a month prior to the Jane’s report, however, another reputable aviation outlet, Aviation Week and Space Technology , also reported on sightings of an unusual aircraft with diamond-shaped lighting seen flying in formation with two F-117 Nighthawks and a KC-135 refueling tanker near Beale Air Force Base in northern California. According to the eyewitness reports in Aviation Week , the unusual aircraft quickly turned off its exterior lighting after joining the formation, and its engine gave off a distinct sound reminiscent of  “air rushing through a big tube.” Beale Air Force Base is quite a bit north of San Gabriel Valley (near Los Angeles) but is still only about 320 miles from Groom Lake, which would take about five minutes to cover at Mach 5.

Other reports tied to Aurora include photographs of unusual contrails dubbed “doughnuts on a rope.” Because of the peculiar look of these vapor trails, it’s been postulated that Aurora may you an advanced pulse detonation engine, but that concept doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. In 2008, the Air Force Research Laboratory built and flew the first (known) PDE aircraft, achieving just 120 miles per hour with an engine comprised of four different PDE pipes each firing 20 times per second . That aircraft, ironically enough, was called “ Borealis .”

In order to achieve hypersonic speeds, a similar PDE would have to fire literally thousands of times per second, making the distance between “doughnuts” of any sort far too small to see from the ground. (We discussed PDE technology more thoroughly in this previous feature .) Instead, if Aurora or something similar did exist, a liquid-methane combined cycle ramjet or scramjet, as was posited by Sweetman in the Washington Post in 1992, would be much more viable.

The reports suggest the possibility that Aurora may have been a program aimed at fielding a hypersonic technology demonstrator that could later serve as the basis for an operational aircraft. However, the earliest reported sightings tied to Aurora began some three years earlier… and on a completely different continent.

Related: DARPA’s new missile hints at truly game-changing technology

Evidence of Aurora as an operational aircraft

The 1992 reports of what seemed like a high-speed aircraft in testing in the vicinity of the now infamous Area 51 could lead one to the reasonable conclusion that Uncle Sam had something exotic flying out of Groom Lake. But a string of sightings in the U.K. beginning in 1989 offered a very different narrative. If these reports are to be believed, American sightings in 1992 weren’t of a new aircraft in testing at all. They were flights of an operational aircraft hidden from the public’s eye.

The most famous of these British sightings came in August of 1989 when a Scottish oil-exploration engineer named Chris Gibson reported seeing an isosceles triangle-shaped aircraft flying in formation with two F-111s and refueling from a KC-135 from his vantage point on an oil rig in the North Sea. Gibson wasn’t just any aviation buff, he was a trained airfield observer adept at identifying aircraft from a distance.

“It was obvious to me that this aircraft was something ‘dodgy’. I watched the formation for a minute or two and went back inside with Graeme,” Gibson later told the Discovery Channel.

“At the time I was writing the aircraft recognition manual and had a Danish Luftmelderkorpset Flykendingsbog in my briefcase. This is probably the best aircraft recognition book ever produced. I looked through it, but nothing matched. I then sketched what I had seen and sent this to Peter Edwards, who was a Group Officer in the ROC [Royal Observer Corps] and was also on the recognition team.“

Some eight years later, in 1997, the U.K.-based aviation magazine Airforces Monthly published a report claiming that an American Aurora aircraft, also referred to in the article as the Astra (Advanced Stealth Reconnaissance Aircraft or AV-6) actually crashed while taking off from Runway 23 at Boscombe Down Airfield in Amesbury, England on September 26, 1994.

Airforces Monthly editor David Oliver claimed the story had taken two years to investigate, citing unnamed sources within the Royal Air Force among other, similarly anonymous, witnesses. According to the report, operators from Britain’s elite Special Air Service (SAS) were soon on the scene and the aircraft was covered by a tarp.

On September 28, two days later, the story alleges that an American C-5 cargo aircraft arrived at Boscombe Down to haul the wreckage, which had been stored covered in a hangar, back to the States.

When asked about the incident, both the British Ministry of Defence and the U.S. Defense Department rejected it as fiction.

Following the money (and dispelling the rumors)

Discussion of the Aurora program for good reason invariably comes down to money. Although the United States military has the largest budget in the world by a wide margin, it also has the furthest-reaching obligations. The U.S. military assumed a significant role in the defense of Europe following the end of World War II. It also provides a stabilizing presence in shipping lanes the world over, and must continuously innovate to maintain a deterrent edge against potential opponents. As a result, even with the massive pool of money in the Pentagon’s coffers to pull from, there’s never quite enough to go around.

Branches must continuously make compromises in order to meet their obligations today while ensuring they’ll be able to meet any challenges that may arise in the future — often prompting difficult and even unpopular decisions about divesting portions of the Navy’s surface fleet or pressing the Air Force to purchase new 4th generation fighters ( like the F-15EX ) instead of modern stealth jets that are more expensive to operate. If you’re going to take a multi-billion-dollar bite out of any publicly disclosed or secretive line of accounting, somebody’s bound to notice.

And notice they have… but it seems most of the internet noticed the wrong thing.

One of the most commonly cited facts you can find about Aurora online is that the program was revealed as a $455 million line item for the production of a classified group of aircraft in a 1985 document projecting Fiscal Year 1987 expenditures.

Supposedly, the story was broken by Aviation Week in 1990. But after digging through the long string of citations linked to by outlets repeating the story, this doesn’t appear to be entirely accurate. The original Aviation Week story isn’t hosted online, but if you trace these numbers back to their earliest hosted source, you’ll find most outlets citing a teal-text-on-black-background “Aurora timeline” page listing developments associated with the alleged Aurora program. The page was taken down in 2009, but can still be accessed via an internet archive .

The 1985 budget revelation, however, was indeed real . Five years prior to the oft-cited Aviation Week story, at least two outlets covered the inclusion of Aurora in the 1985 budget proposal in real-time: the LA Times and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel . Based on this contemporary reporting (as I couldn’t locate the original Defense Department document), the figures associated with “Aurora” were significantly higher than $455 million.

“The document, titled ‘procurement programs,’ indicates that the Defense Department plans to spend $80 million on the Aurora in fiscal 1986, which begins this October, and $2.3 billion in fiscal 1987.”“ Aurora Program May Involve Stealth Bomber or Fighter : Defense Document Tells of Secret Plane ” by Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times — Feb. 9, 1985

The Sun-Sentinel corroborated those numbers, seemingly suggesting the Pentagon had a secret program going on that was expected to cost significantly more than even the B-2 Spirit at the time, which was estimated to cost between $900 million and $1 billion annually.

But there’s still more to this story… While Aurora did appear as an expensive line item on the procurement programs document, the document itself was just a proposal. The following year, when the Fiscal Year 1987 National Defense Authorization Act (defense budget) was submitted to Congress for a vote, both Aurora and its multi-billion dollar expenditure were not included . In other words, Aurora — whatever it may have been — doesn’t seem to have received a single penny.

The truth about the Aurora line item appears to have been revealed in 1994 when Ben Rich, the former head of Lockheed’s legendary Skunk Works who oversaw the development of the F-117 Nighthawk, published his book, Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed .

According to Rich, the infamous “Aurora” line item was actually funding for America’s stealth bomber competition that Northrop ultimately won.

“The rumor surfaced that it was a top-secret project assigned to the Skunk Works – to build America’s first hypersonic airplane,” Rich wrote (with co-author Leo Janos). “That story persists to this day even though Aurora was the code name for the B-2 competition funding. Although I expect few in the media to believe me, there is no code name for the hypersonic plane, because it simply does not exist.”

Congressional approval to move ahead with the production of the B-2 Spirit came in 1987, seemingly substantiating Rich’s sentiment, though it seems unlikely that the money was meant for competition. According to a 1995 report from the Government Accounting Office on B-2 procurement, it was around this period of time that the B-2 program was forced to shift priorities.

“At about the same time, the B-2’s mission emphasis was changed from being principally a strategic bomber capable of delivering nuclear weapons to a conventional bomber capable of delivering precision-guided munitions.”“ B-2 BOMBER: Status of Cost, Development, and Production ,” United Staes Government Accounting Office – August 4, 1995

Because the 1987 budget didn’t ultimately include Aurora, nor did the total budget indicate the $2.3 billion had simply been shifted into another program or distributed across a number of them, it seems the cost may have been anticipated but largely worked around — but not without some degree of headache. According to the same 1995 document, there were pressing concerns that the B-2 would not be ready for service by 1997, with that shift in emphasis cited as one of the problems.

“Test progress has been slower than planned. The test program is planned for completion in July 1997, but our analysis of the tests to be completed and the time that may be needed to complete them indicates that completion by July 1997 is optimistic.”

“The change in emphasis on the B-2 mission from nuclear to conventional increased the need to integrate precision conventional weapons into the B-2 aircraft.”“ B-2 BOMBER: Status of Cost, Development, and Production ,” United Staes Government Accounting Office – August 4, 1995

This isn’t enough to conclude for certain that the Aurora line item on the 1985 document was meant to address concerns about changes to the B-2’s role, but it seems evident that it wasn’t aimed at funding a classified hypersonic strike or reconnaissance aircraft of the same name.

So was the Aurora real? Well… It’s complicated

It does seem extremely unlikely that the United States was operating a fleet of hypersonic reconnaissance or strike aircraft in the 1980s or ’90s under the name “Aurora” or anything else for that matter. It’s evident that the U.S. has continued to invest heavily into advanced propulsion systems like those long-associated with the Aurora effort. Supersonic combustion ramjets, or scramjets , are the engine system commonly associated with Aurora, but if these systems were mature enough for operational aircraft in the 1980s, it seems crazy that the U.S. would dump literally billions of dollars into scramjet development for hypersonic missiles and potentially drone applications since 2016 alone.

Likewise, with a working propulsion system capable of reliably pushing an aircraft to speeds in excess of Mach 5, 6, or 8 (all speeds commonly attributed to Aurora), it also seems unlikely the Air Force would have continued investing heavily into the development of other exotic high-speed propulsion systems like Pulse Detonation or Rotating Detonation engines. Just this week , the Air Force awarded nearly $5 billion in contracts to firms ranging from Lockheed Martin to Pratt & Whitney for the development of more powerful and efficient engines for America’s next generation of fighters.

Even with a lot of money to play with, it’s unlikely that the U.S. would continue to funnel billions into technology that’s less advanced than the systems it was already operating when the original Top Gun was still playing in theaters.

But … and this is a pretty big but …

There is a significant difference between a development program that produces technology demonstrators and an aircraft that’s put into operational service. This distinction was highlighted in 2020 when Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Will Roper, told the press that the U.S. had already built and tested “a full-scale flight demonstrator in the real world” tied to the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. Much of the media reported on it as though that meant the fighter itself was reaching developmental maturity, but a demonstrator needs only to demonstrate the function of systems… it doesn’t have to bear any resemblance to a production platform.

As Tyler Rogoway pointed out for The War Zone , an online defense publication, Northrop’s Tacit Blue stealth technology demonstrator played a vital role in the development of the B-2 Spirit’s low-observable capabilities. But you’d never know they were related by looking at them.

In other words, while it seems entirely unlikely that the Aurora was an operational hypersonic aircraft of any kind, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t a variety of experimental aircraft, prototypes, and technology demonstrators operating out of the wind-swept airstrips of Groom Lake and being spotted in the skies over America’s Southwest. The Cold War was still alive and well in the 1980s, and the United States was still fire-hosing money into forward-reaching defense programs.

The aforementioned Tacit Blue wasn’t revealed to the world until almost a decade after its final flight. Boeing’s alien-looking Bird of Prey technology demonstrator was flying over Area 51 seven years before being revealed. It stands to reason that exotic aircraft, some so rare there may have been only a single prototype, were likely testing systems ranging from advanced propulsion to new stealth technology around Groom Lake through the entirety of both decades. It’s been widely circulated that Area 51 remains the home of a number of aircraft that have yet to be disclosed — some occupying space in hangars, and some meant never to be declassified literally buried in the desert when storage space becomes limited.

With stories of an American hypersonic aircraft named “Aurora” widely circulating as early as 1985, one could argue that Chris Gibson could have seen the real deal four years later flying over the North Sea. Or, one might contend that the F-117, which had just been revealed to the public months earlier and remained widely misunderstood for years to come, could also have been the black triangle he spotted. The B-2 Spirit took its first flight just a month before Gibson’s sighting, making it extremely unlikely that it would cross the Atlantic… but even that seems more feasible than it being a completely different and somehow hypersonic black triangle with no trail of money or even logistics tied to it.

The fervor over the word “Aurora ” likely provided a single catch-all term to lump sightings of a wide variety of unusual aircraft in testing over the United States into, and eventually, from elsewhere as well. Gibson, it’s worth noting, didn’t come forward with his sighting until 1992.

So, while the legend of a hypersonic aircraft called Aurora is likely just that – a legend – that’s not to say that the sightings associated with it, the exotic technologies it was claimed to contain, or the secrecy surrounding such a program are fiction as well.

Aurora may not be real… but out there somewhere, buried in the sands of Groom Lake, may lie an even greater secret just waiting to be revealed.

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The editorial team at Sandboxx.

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Aurora advances to second phase of DARPA ‘active flow’ flight-control experiment

By Ryan Finnerty 2023-01-18T21:55:00+00:00

Boeing subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences is advancing to the next stage of a US military experiment aimed at developing novel methods of aircraft flight control.

The Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) programme is a project of the Pentagon’s technology development arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Source: Aurora Flight Sciences

Aurora’s experimental active flow control design is progressing in a US military X-plane competition to produce an aircraft capable of controlled flight without the use of traditional moving control surfaces

The agency said on 17 January it had selected Aurora to advance to “Phase 2” of CRANE.

“This follows successful completion of the project’s Phase 1 preliminary design, which resulted in an innovative testbed aircraft that used active flow control (AFC) to generate control forces in a wind tunnel test,” DARPA says.

The announcement follows the awarding to Aurora of a  $42 million CRANE development contract  in December.

AFC refers to aircraft designs that eliminate the use of traditional moving control surfaces to manoeuvre, such as rudders and flaps, and instead use actuators and effectors to modify surface airflow by directly adding energy or momentum.

DARPA believes the technique could produce significant improvements in flight performance, including increased range, drag reduction, improved turning radius and angle of attack flight, and higher fuel capacity.

“Over the past several decades, the [AFC] community has made significant advancements that enable the integration of active-flow-control technologies into advanced aircraft,” says CRANE programme manager Richard Wlezien. “We are confident about completing the design and flight test of a demonstration aircraft with AFC as the primary design consideration.”

Competitors in Phase 2 of CRANE “will focus on detailed design and development of flight software and controls, culminating in a critical design review of an X-plane demonstrator that can fly without traditional moving flight controls on the exterior of the wings and tail”, DARPA notes.

Aurora, which specialises in developing aerospace innovations in propulsion and automated flight, first won an early stage exploratory contract for “Phase 0” of CRANE development in 2020.

The firm won a subsequent Phase 1 contract in 2021 covering development of system requirements, initial design and a preliminary airworthiness review.

“Given all that we have learned about AFC and its application to tactical aircraft in prior phases of CRANE, the next step is to prove out these learnings in flight,” says Graham Drozeski, vice-president of government programmes at Aurora.

Under the Phase 2 contract with Aurora, for which DARPA did not release a dollar value, the government will have an option for a Phase 3 procurement deal, which would include the production of a 3,180kg (7,000lb) flight-capable demonstrator.

Aurora says its X-plane will be uncrewed and feature a 9m (30ft) wingspan. If optioned, the company will assemble the craft at facilities in Virginia, West Virginia and Mississippi.

“The vehicle would be used for AFC validation and demonstration at relevant scale and flight conditions, including flight speeds up to Mach 0.7,” Aurora says.

Flight testing is targeted for 2025, the firm adds.

DARPA says the goals of Phase 3 will be to address two engineering challenges: incorporating AFC into a full-scale aircraft and developing reliable technology for controlled flight.

There is no set timeline for progressing between phases of the CRANE project. Multiple manufacturers have designs in earlier stages of the development pipeline, including Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems.

• Department of Defense

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