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| In flight pic from theadvancingblade site. |
I mentioned the Boeing Condor in my article about Hiller Aviation Museum where one of the prototypes currently resides, but I figured a more in-depth write up on it was required, as it is a very unique aircraft.
Created in the late 1980s as an unmanned, remote controlled reconnaissance test bed, it has a wing span of over 200 feet, which is longer than the first flight of the Wright brothers. Overall, the Condor's wingspan is even larger than both the Boeing 747 or the Boeing B-52 bomber as well as having an unprecedented level of flight duration of nearly 80 hours without being refueled. Constructed out of all-bonded carbon fiber composite materials, this gave the Condor a very light weight as well as a fairly low radar cross section despite it's immense size, it's propulsion method of piston prop engines also helped give it a very low heat signature as well.
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| A nice size comparison from theadvancingblade site. |
The ground control stations and crews who operated it were able to pre-program the flight pattern of the aircraft on the ground, or remote control it via a system of satellite communications suites in the aircraft spine much like other UAVs today. Alternatively, they could launch the Condor with a pre-programmed flight, and cancel the programming mid-flight for it to be remote controlled on the ground at any time.
With two examples built by Boeing for testing, the Condor flew out of a facility at Moses Lake, Washington, and in that testing, it immediately began breaking aviation records of the time. It set an altitude record for a piston powered aircraft of 67,000 feet (compare that to the jet record of 123,523 feet) as well as setting another record in that it was the first to fly a fully automated flight from takeoff to landing, another record it set unofficially was an endurance record in 1988 by flying continuously for more than 50 hours. The test program flew 188 hours of test missions overall between the two airframes before it's end.
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| A closeup of the fuselage and antennae from Wikipedia. |
According to the Boeing engineers, the program never was able to mature or achieve its full potential during the testing. They claimed either of the demonstrators could have flown more than 23,000 miles in a single mission, or remained airborne for longer than a week at a time, as well as potentially reach an altitude of 73,000 feet, if needed.
Ultimately, the project was cancelled in 1989, as there were no military customers, as they claimed it would be far too vulnerable to modern Anti-Aircraft weapons and detection systems, since it was not a fully stealth platform, and so cut the funding. The Boeing website for it maintains the Condor would have also had tremendous potential in the civilian market for weather monitoring and atmospheric research, but it did have an expensive and complicated system of logistics as well as launch and recovery compared to other aircraft. They still maintain that it was essential in laying the ground work for more advanced UAV designs that came later on.
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