The Aurora XV-24 LightningStrike is an experimental

unmanned aerial vehicle An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without any human pilot, crew, or passengers on board. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), which includes adding a ground-based controlle ...

created by

Aurora Flight Sciences Aurora Flight Sciences is an American aviation and aeronautics research subsidiary of Boeing which primarily specializes in the design and construction of special-purpose Unmanned aerial vehicles. Aurora has been established for 20+ years and th ...

and partners

Rolls-Royce Rolls-Royce (always hyphenated) may refer to: * Rolls-Royce Limited, a British manufacturer of cars and later aero engines, founded in 1906, now defunct Automobiles * Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, the current car manufacturing company incorporated ...

and

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building technologies, performance ma ...

. It was developed for the Vertical Take-Off and Landing Experimental Aircraft program.

Development

On 3 March 2016, DARPA awarded Aurora Flight Sciences $89.4 million to build and demonstrate their LightningStrike concept, beating out the other three competitors. Phase II of the VTOL X-Plane project will fabricate two air vehicles before flight testing, planned by September 2018.VIDEO: Aurora’s LightningStrike wins DARPA VTOL X-plane comp
- Flightglobal.com, 4 March 2016Check Out the Military’s Experimental Helicopter Plane
- Defenseone.com, 4 March 2016You-Ain’t-Gonna-Believe-This Design Wins DARPA X-Plane Deal
- Breakingdefense.com, 4 March 2016 A 20 percent-scale demonstrator, weighing 325 lb (147 kg) using wings and canards made of carbon composites and

3D-printed 3D printing or additive manufacturing is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model. It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer c ...

plastics, was flown on 29 March 2016. The full-scale aircraft will be designated the ''XV-24A''. In April 2018, after the subscale demonstrator achieved the

VTOL A vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft is one that can take off and land vertically without relying on a runway. This classification can include a variety of types of aircraft including helicopters as well as thrust-vectoring fixed-wi ...

X-Plane major objectives, Darpa cancelled the project before

flight testing Flight testing is a branch of aeronautical engineering that develops specialist equipment required for testing aircraft behaviour and systems. Instrumentation systems are developed using proprietary transducers and data acquisition systems. D ...

due to no successor to inherit the program and growing commercial interest, as electric

distributed propulsion In aeronautics, Distributed propulsion is an arrangement in which the propulsive and related air flows are distributed over the aerodynamic surfaces of an aircraft. The purpose is to improve the craft's aerodynamic, propulsive and/or structural ...

is used in Aurora’s eVTOL aircraft developed with Uber Elevate.

Design

The LightningStrike is a tilting-wing design powered by one Rolls-Royce AE1107C

turboshaft A turboshaft engine is a form of gas turbine that is optimized to produce shaftpower rather than jet thrust. In concept, turboshaft engines are very similar to turbojets, with additional turbine expansion to extract heat energy from the exhaust ...

engine, the same type used on the V-22 Osprey, that generates electric power via three

generators to run 24 distributed ducted fans, three each in the forward canards and 18 across the main wing. Rather than using conventional engines like all the other entrants, the aircraft relies on "distributed electric propulsion" where the three generators that produce three megawatts (4,023

horsepower Horsepower (hp) is a unit of measurement of power, or the rate at which work is done, usually in reference to the output of engines or motors. There are many different standards and types of horsepower. Two common definitions used today are th ...

) of electricity, as much as a commercial

wind turbine A wind turbine is a device that converts the kinetic energy of wind into electrical energy. Hundreds of thousands of large turbines, in installations known as wind farms, now generate over 650 gigawatts of power, with 60 GW added each year. W ...

, power individual motors that drive the fans; each wing fan uses a 100 kW motor, and each canard fan a 70 kW motor. The air vehicle will weigh between , about the size of a

UH-1Y Venom The Bell UH-1Y VenomDoD 4120-15L, ''Model Desi ...

, and cruise faster than 300 knots.

References

{{US STOL and VTOL aircraft Unmanned aerial vehicles of the United States Hybrid electric aircraft

Development

Design

See also

References