Aerion, which has been defining and refining its design for a supersonic business jet (SSBJ) for the past 11 years, is at EBACE, a major European business aviation trade show, this week still quietly confident that it will someday be able to add the word “producer” to its résumé.
To that end, a NASA McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle has been flying this spring from Dryden Flight Research Center in California with an 80- by 40-inch section of Aerion airfoil attached to its belly. This second phase of flight-testing is intended to validate Aerion’s most crucial theory and measure “the real-world robustness of supersonic natural laminar flow.”
For the complete story by Nigel Moll of AINonline, click here.