Oct 152010
Low-speed “free flight” tunnel tests of the HYWARDS hypersonic boost glider, conducted at NASA-Langley in 1959. The HYWARDS was an outgrowth – sorta – of the BoMi and X-15 programs. More on it can be seen in APR issue V2N4, in both the BoMi Part 3 and Ames Mach 10 articles.
[youtube 1j0q5aKb45g]
The HYWARDS vehicle was a nicely angular design. Looks great, seemed to fly ok at low speed, but would have had nightmarish heating issues along those leading edges. The cones on the wingtips were control surfaces.
Note in the video that there appears to be a second, fixed model being tested at the same time. The second model appears to have wings of variable incidence, changing from test to test.
One Response to “HYWARDS wind tunnel test video”
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So _that’s_ what the wingtip bodies were all about; I always wondered about that.
What’s the aircraft model in the background during the wind tunnel tests?
It looks like they were testing separation aerodynamics as HYWARDS comes off of the back of a manned fly-back booster, with canard forward surfaces, which looks like it owes a lot to the Regulus II cruise missile.