The American aircraft manufacturer Boeing has shown a new concept of a promising reusable hypersonic drone Valkyrie. According to Air Force Magazine, it is distinguished by a blunt nose, a flatter fuselage and rounded air intakes on the sides.
Most hypersonic aircraft today are rockets and gliders that are not designed for reusable use. But there are exceptions. For example, Lockheed Martin, Hermeus and Boeing projects to create hypersonic drones.
Boeing first introduced the Valkyrie hypersonic drone project in 2018. It was a "tailless" with two keels slightly tilted to the sides and a wing of great sweep. Two jet engines were located in the engine nacelles under the fuselage of the device.
It was not specified what kind of engines they were supposed to be. But the head of research in the field of Boeing hypersonic flight, Kevin Bowcatt, said that they would be used both for takeoff and for accelerating the device to hypersonic speed. Existing turbojet power plants and hypersonic ramjet engines cannot operate in the entire speed range from zero to five sound speeds.
With its contours, the drone slightly resembled the SR-71 Blackbird. In size, its full-size prototype was also supposed to be comparable to this reconnaissance aircraft (32.7 meters in length, 5.6 meters in height and 16.9 meters in wingspan).
The concern showed the new Valkyrie concept at the AIAA meeting in San Diego last week. The drone got a blunt nose and a flatter fuselage. It still has two engines, but they are not located side by side in the center of the fuselage, but on the sides. The latter will increase the internal volume of the device.
Four years after first unveiling its hypersonic airliner concept at #AIAASciTech 2018 @Boeing has revealed a refined, more realistic Mach 5 reusable air-breathing design targeting military and space launch roles at @aiaa San Diego event pic.twitter.com/CtpxA5OJGn
— Guy Norris (@AvWeekGuy) January 4, 2022
According to Mark Lewis, executive director of the Institute of New Technologies of the National Defense Industrial Association, the power plant of the drone will be a combined cycle. It will take off using a gas turbine engine and, having gained sufficient supersonic speed, launch a ramjet engine to accelerate to hypersound.
You can read more about the history of combined engines for aircraft in our material "Speed Combinator" .
Vasilisa Chernyavtseva
