In a conference call with reporters today, NASA said it would not fly the X-57 experimental electric aircraft because the time and money spent on the project would not overcome safety concerns.of X-57 program ends Planes never go up in the sky.
The agency had previously hoped to fly the aircraft, powered by batteries and electric motors, this year. Original plans were to eventually have a dozen or so propellers on the research craft, but NASA planned to scale back those plans and fly in a configuration called Modification 2. Mod 2 included an airplane with only two propellers, one on each wing. Today’s news means the plane will never fly, even in Mod 2 form.
NASA said safety and time were the reasons for permanently halting flights. “Unfortunately, we recently discovered a potential failure mode in the propulsion system during ground testing that we determined poses an unacceptable risk to the safety of pilots and the safety of ground personnel,” said Brad Armstrong, Director of Flight at NASA. Lee Frick said. The California research center said by phone: “Mitigating this glitch would take the project well past the planned end of the year, so NASA has decided to finish the project on schedule without flying the vehicle. ”
[Related: NASA’s ‘airliner of the future’ is now officially an X-plane]
This project has had problems for a long time. For example, a transistor module in an electrical inverter repeatedly failed and “exploded” during testing, Sean Clark, the project’s principal investigator, told Popular Science in January. Clark said the issue has been resolved.
The problem that led to the cancellation of plans to fly the aircraft stemmed from the motor that powers the propeller. Clark said today that an analysis of the issue is underway. “Upon further analysis and airworthiness evaluation of the motor itself, we found that there are several potential failure modes that we have not seen on the ground mechanically in the motor under flight loads.” he said. “There’s a nice design underway to fix it, but that’s just the thing.” [that] It takes too long to think about and implement it. ”
The NASA team emphasized that they are still proud of the way they openly contributed to the wider industry. Private companies continue to work on electric flight, Tons of technical papers. “I don’t feel good about not being able to fly,” Flick admitted. He added that the disappointment did not diminish “the game-changing lessons that this project team has contributed to the industry.”
NASA has two other X-Plane programs underway. This designation means that this aircraft is for experimental and research use and comes from the Department of Defense. (X-57 is X designation in 2016) The other is the X-59, which NASA plans to fly this year, hoping to demonstrate that supersonic flight can be quieter than ever before. The other is the newly designated X-66A, also known as the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator. The current flight schedule is to fly in 2028.
Frick cautiously estimated that with more budget and more time to get the X-57 aircraft into the air, they could have done it safely. “We have a design that can overcome the difficulties we have now, but it has not yet been fully analyzed and considered,” he added. “We were confident that we could solve this problem. I’m not sure if there are other issues that we haven’t discovered yet.”