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Aurora (aircraft)

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Aurora is the popular name for a hypothesised American reconnaissance aircraft, believed by some to be capable of hypersonic flight at speeds of Mach 6-20. According to the hypothesis, the Aurora was developed in the 1980s or 1990s as a replacement for the aging and expensive SR-71 Blackbird. "Aurora" appeared below the SR-71 Blackbird and U-2 in the 1985 Pentagon budget request, thus putting the name into the public domain. No conclusive evidence supporting the existence of a hypersonic plane has ever reached the public domain.

Origin and History

According to Aviation Week, Aurora refers to a group of exotic aircraft projects, and not to one particular airframe. Funding of the project allegedly reached $2.3 billion in fiscal 1987, according to a 1986 procurement document obtained by Aviation Week. According to an "Exclusive Special Report" published in Military Space in January 1995, "Aurora was canceled by the 'then-DOD boss Cheney' in 1992, after he was informed that Aurora vehicles would cost approximately $1 billion per flight article."

A noted proponent of Aurora is oilworker and aircraft spotter, Chris Gibson. In August 1989, while working as an engineer on a North Sea oil platform, he saw an unfamiliar triangle-shaped vehicle and drew a picture of it. This was followed by a photograph circulated on the Internet showing such an aircraft being escorted into RAF Machrihanish by two F-111s. The photograph was clearly a fake, but the association with Machrihanish has remained to this day.

Lockheed's Skunk Works, now the Lockheed Advanced Development Company, was suggested as the prime contractor for the Aurora. Throughout the 1980s, financial analysts concluded that Lockheed had been engaged in several large classified projects, but the known projects could not account for the declared net income.

Additional discussion comes from several unexplained sonic booms that occurred over California (especially Los Angeles) and Nevada in the 1990s. It has been suggested that these may have been created by Aurora aircraft heading to or from the Groom Lake air base.

In 1998, another aircraft spotter videotaped two unusual contrails in quick succession. One of the sights appeared to be a fireball, while the other was described as "doughnuts on a rope." The triangular craft is rumored to have an unconventional propulsion system. Many experts speculate that the vehicle is powered by hydrogen or methane, though methane is the preferred candidate because of its significantly greater density.

In the 1980s and 1990s, NASA and several aerospace companies proposed multiple aircraft designs for hypersonic aircraft that are reminiscent of the aircraft described by Gibson. Some appeared to be based around what was learned from experiments with the XB-70 Valkyrie waverider airplane, which used air compressed by the supersonic shockwave around the aircraft to generate additional lift.

The fuel would likely be cryogenically cooled and stored in liquid form, though it would probably be cycled through the leading edges of the aircraft to provide cooling, since supersonic and hypersonic flight generate a significant amount of heat. Ultimately, the fuel would probably be fed into a ramjet, scramjet, or pulse detonation engine. Additionally, the strongly-swept (75 degrees in some enthusiasts’ artwork) triangular shape of the airplane would probably make it an ideal high-speed waverider design. As to the feasibility of these concepts, NASA and other groups continue to publicly work on scramjet technology in 2005, but thrust-producing scramjets remain research projects with severe limitations (notably not working at all until a craft reaches supersonic speeds, as well as very low thrust-weight ratios). Pulse detonation engines remain the subject of active research by US aerospace companies, but no prototype has yet flown.

For a time in the 1990s, the Aurora aircraft (SR-91) became a touchstone for every "cool" technology then under development. Soon it was appearing on the cover of various magazines such as Popular Science, and for some time was considered to "obviously exist" because the SR-71 had been retired and it was popularly believed that something was needed to fill the role. The Testors company produced a model kit based on designs popularized in the press. Other companies also got into the business. Estes Industries made a model rocket kit, and Galoob made a Micro Machines toy version of the theoretical aircraft.

However, a paucity of additional sightings, combined with the widespread understanding that the US is now using low-speed "stealthy" drone aircraft in the reconnaissance role, led some observers to conclude by 1999, that even if the Aurora had existed, it was probably no longer in service.

In the book Skunk Works, Ben Rich, the former head of Lockheed's Skunkworks division, claims that the Aurora was simply the budgetary code name for the stealth bomber fly-off that resulted in the B-2 Spirit.

In Fiction

  • A "Black Triangle" of an aircraft from Area 51 is the object pursued by Special Agents Mulder and Scully in the X-Files episode ["Dreamland"]. Although, in the series it uses a form of alien propulsion system.
  • In the Playstation/Nintendo 64 game Vigilante 8, 3 black aircraft in the Area 51 level look a lot like artist concepts of the Aurora.
  • The aircraft can also be glimpsed in the computer game F-22 ADF and its sequel Total Air War, both by Digital Image Design - now Rage Warrington.
  • Jane's Fighters Anthology military flight simulator included the "Aurora Spy Plane" as a flyable aircraft.
  • The Aurora is also briefly mentioned in the movie Broken Arrow during the B-2 flight sequence.
  • There was also confusion over whether images taken on an aircraft carrier were of the Aurora, however these images turned out to be of a movie prop taken during the filming of Stealth.
  • The film Aurora: Operation Intercept features the aircraft in detail.
  • Also, the plane shortly appears during an episode of JAG.
  • The plane is mentioned and used in the book Deception Point by Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code) where he states at the beggining that all technologies listed in this book exist. It used a misted-methane Pulse Wave Detonation Engine.

See also

Literature

  • Rich, Ben; Janos, Leo. (1996) Skunk Works. Little, Brown & Company, ISBN 0316743003
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