Dragonfly takes flight

second canard rotor/wing (CRW) technology demonstrator – the X-50A Dragonfly unmanned air vehicle – has successfully completed a four-minute hover flight at the US Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in southwest Arizona. The aircraft reached an altitude of about 20 feet above ground.

“Our first flight test objectives were met today,” said Clark Mitchell, Boeing Phantom Works program manager for the CRW prototype. “This is a significant achievement toward validating the new stopped-rotor technology.”

Under joint development by Boeing Phantom Works and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the CRW is an aircraft that combines the speed and range of fixed-wing flight with the flexibility of rotary-wing flight. It also incorporates tip jet propulsion and stopped rotor technologies.

“The most significant objective met was verification that software compensation effectively reduces the rotor control issue we were having, or cross coupling,” he said. The phenomenon of cross coupling was a finding in the mishap investigation of Ship 1 in 2004 that led to wind tunnel tests for Ship 2 at the Boeing helicopter facility in Philadelphia earlier this year.