Hypersonic Aircraft Test Fails; Plane Is Destroyed

Shattering hopes for the first successful flight of a hypersonic aircraft, a 12-foot experimental plane equipped with a special jet engine was destroyed Saturday after its booster veered out of control and began to fall apart.

NASA ground controllers ordered the plane destroyed 51 seconds after it was launched from a B-52 flying over the Pacific Ocean several hundred miles west of Los Angeles. The X-43A plane was attached to a Pegasus booster rocket, which began to fall apart as it started to climb.

“At this point, we don’t know what happened,” said Alan Brown, a NASA spokesman at Dryden Flight Research Center, where the agency conducts flight research. “Obviously, this is a big disappointment.”

The plane, also known as Hyper X, was NASA’s first hope of attaining and surpassing hypersonic speed--about five times the speed of sound. Aerospace engineers, who have been trying to develop the technology for more than four decades, consider the feat more formidable than sending a man to the moon.

The cost of the plane and booster was not immediately known, but the X-43A destroyed Saturday was the first of three being built under a seven-year, $185-million program. The plane was powered by a supersonic combustion ramjet engine that takes oxygen from the atmosphere and burns liquid hydrogen. Efforts to build such a ramjet-powered craft, a step toward a low-cost, reusable space plane, have failed for decades.

NASA officials watching the launch on video monitors first cheered as the booster with the X-43A attached to its nose cleanly detached from the wing of the B-52 at 24,000 feet and began a planned five-second free fall. Then the booster ignited as expected, propelling the aircraft forward.

About 10 seconds later, as it began to climb up, the nose veered to the left. The booster momentarily appeared to be correcting itself before pieces began falling off, causing the aircraft to spiral downward. Under the NASA plan, the booster was supposed to climb to 95,000 feet, where it would have then released the hypersonic aircraft.

But within seconds, a pilot in an F-18 chase plane reported that the aircraft was out of control, and Dryden Test Director Brad Neal ordered the plane destroyed, initiating a self-destruct mechanism on the booster.

If successful, the world’s first hypersonic plane would have shattered the speed record for an air-breathing jet, surpassing the record set by an SR-71, the world’s fastest plane. Known as the Blackbird, the plane can fly up to 2,100 mph. Ironically, the B-52 carrying the hypersonic plane was parked on the same tarmac with an SR-71 before it took off on the ill-fated flight.

The plane was designed by Boeing Co. at its Seal Beach operation and built by Micro Craft in Ontario and Tullahoma, Tenn. Dulles, Va.-based Orbital Sciences Corp. built the booster.