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First flight planned for unmanned jet

Trouble with engine start sequencing and propulsion acoustics delayed the planned December flight of an unmanned aerial system, which might form part of a fleet of unmanned, carrier-based bombers. Despite that delay in the first flight of the X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System-Demonstrator jet, program officials are confident they will see wheels up in early 2010.

The maiden flight will take place at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., sometime in the first three months of the year.

“It will be a very short flight. It will be a low-risk flight, so we won’t be flying high, fast, far,” said Cyndi Wegerbauer, a Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems spokeswoman in San Diego.

In the past year, teams from Naval Air Systems Command’s UCAS-D program office and Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems have put the X-47B through a series of preflight tests. They will put the innovative bat-wing shaped aircraft through low-speed taxi testing at Northrop Grumman’s manufacturing facility near Palmdale, in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles later this month or early next month, Wegerbauer said.

The second X-47B has been built and configured with an autonomous aerial refueling system and also will fly during 2010, she said.

By late summer 2010, the first aircraft will arrive at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., for additional testing and flights ahead of planned testing aboard an aircraft carrier out of Norfolk, Va., and eventual sea trials by 2012, officials said.

The unmanned X-47B, built with twin bays that can carry precision-guided munitions, is designed to land and take off from existing aircraft carriers and fly farther and for longer missions than current manned aircraft can do.

“We look forward to our first flight early in the new year,” Capt. Martin Deppe, the UCAS-D program manager, said in a NavAir news release, “but we won’t go until we’re ready.”