Avionics News April 2021 - 33

air-launched liquid rocket designed for hypersonic flight
test. This air vehicle earned a U.S. Air Force experimental
designation of X-60A.
" That (X-60A) was a liquid rocket designed to improve
the accessibility to Mach 5 plus flight conditions, " Piplica
said. " There's obviously a lot of work going on right now in
hypersonics, mainly in the Department of Defense for hypersonic weapons and defense against these weapons. The real
difficulty is integrating everything into a kind of sufficiently
efficient system that can work for a particular set of payloads over a certain range and so forth. From a technology
standpoint, there isn't a whole lot of science to be done; it's
mainly engineering. "
Hermeus points out that the core technologies of hypersonics are mature. Engine components have been flying
since the 1950s, flight controls work beyond Mach 5, and the
materials needed are now commercially available.
The Hermeus team includes alumni from SpaceX, Blue
Origin, NASA, Boeing, GE and Honeywell. In its recruiting criteria, Hermeus looks for people with ambition, vision,
humility (an appreciation for unknown unknowns), reasoning
(the use of first principles in problem solving) and chill (the
ability to fit in during countless hours with the team). They are
looking for this in people with skills in avionics, aerodynamics, business development, finance, marketing, propulsion,
software, structures, systems and testing. Recent openings
listed a mechanical engineer and a test engineer in propulsion
and, amusingly, " general badass applicants. " So if you are a
truly gifted aviation or aerospace person, they want to know
about you even though they may not have a current opening.
Achieving hypersonic flight for commercial, defense and
intelligence applications will require investment in the billions of dollars, Piplica acknowledged, adding that whether
the funding in the end will be $1 billion or $10 billion, it
will take " a lot of coin " to solve all the problems involved in
making this happen.
Seeing that commercial aircraft have been flying around
the world mostly stuck at Mach .8 for half a century, Piplica
said he and his colleagues saw a chance to make a difference,
so they " quit their jobs, jumped off a cliff and are trying to
build an airplane on the way down. "
First, they built a small, subscale engine combining a
turbojet with a ramjet that can operate from sea level up to
100,000 feet at up to Mach 5. It was tested in February 2020.
The team is scaling up the engine technology for demonstration on a ground test and then in the air to show it can propel
an air vehicle up to Mach 5 and back. Then the company will
tackle long-duration hypersonic flight challenges to develop
a system that is sufficiently reliable and has the performance
needed to carry 20 people across the Atlantic ocean and " create a smaller planet for us. "

Piplica said the speed barrier in civil aviation was broken for
a while, but it was just a blip on the screen. The money-losing
Concorde could fly Mach 2 in airline service for 27 years and
set a trans-Atlantic speed record of 2 hours and 52 minutes from
New York to London in 1996. He wants to create a " regional
world " where New York and London are no farther apart than
Paris and London are by train today. " And the real implication of that type of transportation network is that anytime
you increase the speed of the network, you'll see some pretty
massive social and economic impacts. " We want to turn the
world around from something that is accessible in a few days to
something that is accessible in a few hours, " he said.
Hypersonic passenger aircraft will reduce the barriers to
face-to-face contact and communications. He thinks a lot is
lost when sitting at home talking to each other rather than
being in person. Senior government officials and senior
leaders in the military and in civilian life may find face-toface conversations essential, especially in times of crisis.
The Defense Department's interest in moving things around
the planet faster includes human passengers, according to
Piplica. The U.S government's executive transport organization is interested in high-speed travel. Piplica thinks by the
end of the decade a supersonic business jet or airline aircraft
will be operating, but only toward the end of the decade will
a hypersonic aircraft be in development.
Hermeus will be following an iterative process to build a
series of different aircraft to " start buying down technical risk
for long-duration hypersonic flight. " Little flying had occurred
in the hypersonic regime at the time Hermeus was formed, so
there is little data available. In addition, there are challenges in
propulsion, airframe, reusability, maintenance and other areas.
" Space X has proven there is a means of developing complex
systems that rely not just on analytical tools and models, but
on getting to integrated hardware and software systems as
quickly as possible, " he said. The Department of Defense will
find considerable value in advances Hermeus plans to make on
some of these challenges in the next few years.
So the four visionary companies on the VBACE panel
have put their money on innovative new technologies and
a key question is whether the FAA is also ready to go. The
four panelists said yes and are all working closely with the
FAA. Piette said the FAA is willing to work on autonomy,
for example, and there is a lot of anticipation in the industry
to make use of autonomy. The FAA is changing its processes and is dedicating cross-disciplinary teams to work
on new concepts and innovations with the companies that
are developing the new technology. " It doesn't just involve
technology on the aircraft, it also involves how to integrate
these air vehicles into the airspace, " Piette said. " So I am
very thankful that the regulators are fully on board with these
efforts and are working to assist us. " q
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Avionics News April 2021

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