Watch NASA’s top test flight arrive before the system’s warning

Nothing seemed to go wrong NASAFor testing IX-59 is a top flight touched down after its second air test, coasting smoothly on the runway.

But the sleek, needle-nosed plane had only spent nine minutes in the air on Friday, March 20, before the emergency room warning light came on. That warning was separate from the warning light that occurred during the takeoff attempt before 10 a.m. PT, said Cathy Bahm, project manager at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center.

The short flight from Edwards Air Force Base in California at 10:54 am PT was marked only the second time the plane has flown. Although the team originally planned for about an hour, leaders stressed that even short flights provide new data to move the project forward. You can watch the landing in the video below.

Bob Pearce, who heads NASA’s spaceflight research, said the team made the right call to abort the flight on Friday. The agency expects to find and fix problems in this phase of the X-plane, a plane built by the US to test new flight technologies and ideas.

“Sometimes it’s easy to forget that building this kind of experimental aircraft means creating something that has never existed,” Pearce said at the time. news conference. “As for the X-planes, it’s not unusual.”

IX-59 is part of a long-term effort to change how fast commercial airliners fly on the surface of the earth. Traditional high-powered airplanes create a lot of noise when they break the sound barrier, which is why the US government bans high-speed passenger planes from flying over densely populated areas. NASA and its contractors, Lockheed Martin, designed the X-59 to fly faster than sound while producing only a “thump,” with the goal of providing regulators and industry with the evidence needed to reconsider the limits.

At the kind of top speed NASA wants to target the X-59 at – about 925 mph – a non-stop flight from New York to LA would take less than three hours. Today’s airlines usually cruise at about 550 mph on that route, so passengers usually spend about 5 to 6 hours cross-country.

A sonic boom occurs when an aircraft flies faster than the speed of sound, compressing the pressure waves into a single shock wave that hits the ground like a sudden burst of air. NASA designed the X-59 so that its structure spreads those pressure changes across the plane, turning that single sharp shock into a series of smaller pulses.

The civilians below did not hear the explosion of the X-59 during the first two test flights – and they were not supposed to. The plane did not fly fast enough at any time to land. Both planes intentionally landed at low speed. NASA uses these early tests to shake up the systems and see how the spacecraft handles.

During Friday’s test, the plane was supposed to fly for about an hour, reaching a cruising speed of 230 mph at 12,000 feet before accelerating to 260 mph at 20,000 feet. The plane did not exceed 230 mph, officials said.

“I was really hoping to talk a lot about the nine-minute flight,” said Less, who flew the X-59 for the first time on the mission. “Although I didn’t intend to land in a rush when I first arrived, the flight performed well.”

He described the plane as acting like its simulators. Over hundreds of hours of testing in the simulator, Less and other test pilots practiced an unusual optical system that combines images from cameras into a high-definition display. But it was the first time he had flown without a traditional front window.

A long nose shape that helps soften the sonic boom leaves no room for a standard cockpit windshield. But in some cases, the system provides better visibility than the physical eye, he said. If the driver is facing the sun, for example, image processing can reduce glare and improve contrast.

“It felt really comfortable,” he said. “Even though I was blind before, I can see the sides and match that.”

More than 100 test flights are planned. NASA intends to gradually move toward higher, faster aircraft before testing those strange booms in cities.