Stratolaunch Sends World’s Largest Aircraft on Second Test Flight
- Florencia Lombardi
- May 28, 2021
- 2 min read
Stratolaunch, an aerospace firm founded by Paul Allen, one of the co-founders of Microsoft, flew its behemoth carrier airplane for a second time. On Thursday, 19th of May, “Roc” completed the company’s first flight under new ownership, two years after the first test flight of this special plane.
“Today’s flight, at first review, has appeared extremely successful,” said Stratolaunch’s Chief Operating Officer Zachary Krevor. He added that “We accomplished all test points as desired, we have not seen anything anomalous, and we are very pleased with the condition of the aircraft upon landing.”
During this flight, Roc rose to 4267 meters and traveled at a top speed of 199 mph. The plane soared through the air for 3 hours and 14 minutes, which is almost an hour longer than its first flight in 2019.
An interesting moment of this event happened at touchdown, when one of the landing gears settled on the runway, while the other was still in the air. Krevor stated in a conference that this type of touchdown is preferred in crosswind landings. “Though we stayed within our crosswind limits, we did have a little bit of a crosswind, and the aircrew did an excellent job of bringing the aircraft down.”
Roc was built by the company Scaled Composites and was designed to carry over 500,000 pounds of payload. This unique plane has six engines and two fuselages, but what makes it one of a kind is its wingspan. Stratolaunch’s aircraft, which looks like two planes fused, has a world-record wingspan of 117,3 meters.
The original goal was to build an aircraft capable of launching satellites mid-air. However, the vision of the behemoth plane has changed. The new owners plan to make it into a launch platform for hypersonic vehicles that travel five times faster than the speed of sound.
"Roc", the world's largest airplane, launched its second test flight on May 19th, with hopes of more to follow
Bibliography
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