Ejector ramjet engines hold promise for several high-speed air vehicle applications, from sounding rockets to "Aurora" type aircraft to space launch booster aircraft. The staff of A & E Engineering have experience with such engines; a vehicle meant to test an ejector ramjet was built by current A & E Engineering staff while employees of a company working under a NASA SBIR Phase II contract. The ejector ramjet test vehicle stood more than 23 feet high, and featured a 450 pound thrust nitrous oxide/methanol liquid fuel rocket engine as the main ejector. So far as is known, no other ejector ramjet flight vehicles have been built or flown.
In the process of designing and building the ejector ramjet test vehicle, a large scale model was built and tested. This model duplicated the aerodynamics of the full-size vehicle to high fidelity, and included variable geometry mounts for the solid rocket boosters. The model successfully demonstrated the stability of the design, as only one of the three commercially produced solid rockets ignited at launch. A second ignited a second or so later, but even though the thrust was quite off-balance, the vehicle maintained stable flight at all times.
As well as the ejector ramjet test vehicle, A & E Engineering has also designed several other flight vehicles employing ejector ramjets as the primary propulsion system, included an air-to-air system proposed to the USAF.
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