The U.S. Air Force has commissioned Leidos to work on a large air-jet hypersonic drone capable of reconnaissance, reconnaissance, surveillance and strike missions.
Speed is still a huge advantage in the skies, and the military is working hard to bring weapons systems to hypersonic speeds, more than five times the speed of sound. The Mayhem will be an unmanned hypersonic aircraft capable of performing missions once performed by the legendary SR-71 Blackbird, with a variety of variable payloads.
It has been suggested that the Mayhem drone may have some relation to Lockheed Martin’s SR-72 (son of the Blackbird) manned hypersonic aircraft and may use a similarly revolutionary “combined cycle” propulsion system to circumvent the fact that hypersonic thrusters simply do not work on takeoff and landing, subsonic and even supersonic speeds.
But it seems that everything can be simpler. In a press release celebrating the $334 million contract win, defense contractor Leidos describes the Mayhem as an “unstoppable hypersonic multi-purpose ISR and Strike program” and says it will use hypersonic propulsion for propulsion. This means that it may not be able to take off on its own; it may need to be launched on a rocket capable of making the drone move fast enough to wake up the engine. However, the same problems are expected on speed down and landing on the runway.
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The four-and-a-half-year project begins with a review of system requirements and a conceptual design.
Russian media reported the crash of a drone at the Engels air base after Ukroboronprom announced the final tests of the long-range UAV
Source: New Atlas
