X-43A team receives first McDonnell award

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Julius Delos Reyes
  • 95th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  The X-43A Flight Test Team was awarded the first-ever James S. McDonnell Award for 2006.

The James S. McDonnell Award is awarded by the Society of Flight Test Engineers to honor extraordinary flight test teams, said John Minor, SFTE president.

James McDonnell was an aviation pioneer and founder of the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, later McDonnell Douglas. He also founded the James McDonnell Foundation that supports and gives grants to research and academic scholarships.

"We were very pleased to win the James S. McDonnell Team Award for outstanding achievement in the field of flight test engineering presented by the Society of Flight Test Engineers," said Paul Reukauf, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center hypersonics associate project manager. "While the X-43A Project has won a number of awards such as the Aviation Week Laurels Award for Aviation/Propulsion and the NASA Turning Goals Into Reality Administrators Award, this award recognizes the efforts of the flight test team."

The X-43A Project was important because it demonstrated, in flight, a technology that had been worked on for half a century, Mr. Reukauf said. These tests proved the tools and facilities used to design hypersonic aircraft are adequate to predict their actual flight performance.

"While there is much work to be done in the areas of materials, structures, system optimization and reusability," he said, "we are confident, based on the X-43A experience, the resulting aircraft are feasible and will perform as designed."

The team evaluated the performance of an airframe-integrated, hydrogen fueled, dual-mode scramjet-powered research vehicle at Mach 7 and Mach 10. They also demonstrated airbreathing powered and non-powered hypersonic aircraft flight. The X-43A team also developed an innovative rapid-prototyping approach for design fabrication of three research vehicles for three separate flight demonstrations.

The program was designed to transfer hypersonic airbreathing vehicle technology from the laboratory to the flight environment.

The X-43A team garnered the first ever successful separation of two non-powered vehicles in a high environment. They also had the first free flight of a hypersonic shaped vehicle powered by a fully integrated scramjet at Mach 7 and Mach 10.

The X-43A is a joint program executed by NASA Dryden and NASA Langley Research Center, Air Force Flight Test Center, Naval Weapons Center at Point Mugu, Calif., ATK-GASL, Boeing and Orbital Sciences Corp.

"It was a very cohesive team where the individual with the greatest knowledge was utilized regardless of organizational affiliation," Mr. Reukauf said. "I give these individuals credit for keeping the team focused on our flights."