According to a May 20 Boeing release, the planned May 25 test flight of the X-51A will be the only hypersonic flight attempt this year because of high-demand for test assets like the B-52 that will carry the vehicle aloft over the Pacific from Edwards AFB, Calif. the X-51A, a collaboration by Boeing, the Air Force Research Lab, and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, is expected to reach Mach 6 over a five-minute autonomous flight before it crashes into the Pacific. “In those 300 seconds, we hope to learn more about hypersonic flight with a practical scramjet engine than all previous flight tests combined,” said Charlie Brink, AFRL’s X-51A program manager. Boeing’s Alex Lopez said that if the test “meets even a subset of our expectations, the leap in engine technology will be equivalent to the post-World War II leap from propellers to jet engines.”
The Air National Guardsman who was arrested last year for sharing hundreds of top secret and classified documents to online chatrooms was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison on Nov. 12 after pleading guilty to several charges this March.