X32 Aircraft - The Boeing X-32 is best remembered for its insane looks, but its lead test pilot reveals why looks can be deceiving.
In 2001, two aircraft were ahead of the competition for the massive Joint Strike Fighter contract. The winner of the competition would go on to become the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, while the loser, the Boeing X-32, would live largely as a punchline for its unusual appearance. However, there is more to the X-32 story than meets the eye. In a recent interview, the chief test pilot for the X-32 program told us all about the jet and why the X-35 lost it.
X32 Aircraft
That pilot is now Commander Phillip "Rowdy" Yates, a former Naval aviator who served, among other things, as an F-14 Tomcat air-to-ground weapons test officer for the Squadron - Test and Evaluation of Air 23 (VX-23). ) at Naval Air Station Patuxent River. In a YouTube interview published last year, Yates sat down with Ward "Mooch" Caroll, a retired Navy Commander who served as the Radar Interception Officer for the F-14 and is the current Director of Outreach and Marketing for the US Naval Institute, as well as a published author.
Boeing X 32
In the nineties, the Department of Defense began to conduct studies on the development of a family of aircraft to replace a wide range of existing combat and strike aircraft. Several aerospace companies submitted designs for what was then called the Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) program. At the request of Congress, the JAST program merged with an existing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program to develop a short takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) tactical jet with advanced capabilities. And so, the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program was born.
The JSF program eventually settled on entries from two companies, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, who presented their competing designs for the program's concept demonstration phase. From 1997 to 2001, the two companies were tasked with building and testing two aircraft that could demonstrate capabilities for three different variants: conventional takeoff/landing, short takeoff/vertical landing, and vertical takeoff/landing.
While serving with VX-23 Yates received a phone call asking him if he wanted to be one of the first pilots to fly the X-32 or X-35 as part of the JSF competition. In a 2003 interview on the PBS series
, Yates said the opportunity to test the X-32 was the high point of his career as a test pilot. “The dream has come true. You can use all the banal phrases. Most of my friends and contemporaries are probably jealous of what I've done with the X-32. I don't know how to say it better than it was the highlight of my career. "
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Yates initially worked with a team of test pilots and engineers who supported the development of the two fighters. A year before the first actual flight tests, Yates was assigned to the X-32 program, where personnel from the X-32 and X-35 teams were prohibited from join each other. Only Yates and his Air Force counterpart who runs the X-35 program, Lt.Col. Paul Smith, the first government pilot to fly the X-35, was allowed to speak.
"When I got into the program, they were pretty far along in the design process," Yates said, adding that the initial X-32 design was a derivative of a secret, secret aircraft concept from " black program” with Boeing. in their portfolio. and that the company "made the decision to exploit that design for their X-32." As the interview revealed, that decision may have cost Boeing the lucrative JSF contract.
The initial requirements communicated by the two contractors were simple. Competing aircraft must be able to take off and land independently, be able to approach the carrier landing in a simulated carrier landing area, and be able to execute short/vertical takeoffs and vertical landings. Every major design must exhibit those three capabilities with only two variants.
Testing was very limited due to the limited capabilities of the demonstration aircraft. There is not much requirement for high-G or higher speed maneuvers. "The designs are not intended for those kinds of evaluations," Yates said. Instead, each contractor was given just $1 billion and told they had four to five years to build their JSF design based on simple requirements.
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"This was not a fly-off," emphasized Yates in the interview. "This is to give each team the requirements, and then fly. Go design, build, and fly your plane and then submit a proposal. The X-32 and X-35 did not go through the same flight testing exercises in a "drag-race" format, but instead developed and conducted separate testing regimes of their own.
According to Yates, part of the reason for the separate testing schemes is that the program office does not want Congress to call the test pilots to report how each plane is flown. "They're just protesters," Yates said. "Each contractor will design their own flight test program, what they want to demonstrate beyond the requirements, and just let the evaluation happen back to the program office with the proposals. The data from the flight test will obviously be included in those proposals, but it is not about who can fly faster, who can fly better, who can stay the longest, who can do the most carrier procedures or like that.
Yates was assigned what he called a "mini-detachment" of 20 maintenance crew personnel and two F/A-18s sent from VX-23 to serve as chase planes during flight tests of the X-32. Meanwhile, the Lockheed Martin team used F-16s stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Yates was mostly involved in testing how the aircraft responded during carrier approaches and evaluating the X-32's handling properties.
Artist's rendering of a notional US Marine Corps version of the Boeing Joint Strike Fighter based on the X-32., Public Domain
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"They use the handling qualities of the F-18 and the control laws of the range for the X-32. After flying the F-18 over the ship, that's the comment I made after just a few FCLP [ Field Carrier Landing Practice], which we can call bounce periods, that we bring that aircraft to the ship tomorrow. He handled it very smoothly and precisely. I can make fine corrections, I can make gross corrections back to centerline, back to glide path. There was no question about the handling qualities of the X-32 I flew."
Carroll then asked about the STOVL tests conducted on the two aircraft. "It's a big deal," Yates said. "Maybe that's the one where we give a little shit and say 'damn'."
In those tests, the Lockheed Martin X-35 was able to demonstrate STOVL and supersonic flight in the same configuration, while the Boeing X-32 required a maintenance crew to make changes to the plane.
The X-35's STOVL design is also "more technologically advanced," Yates said. For vertical lift, the X-35 has a separate 48-inch lift fan fed from an inlet behind the cockpit that redirects fresh air from the top of the aircraft to its underside. The X-35 also includes a rotary exhaust system that recirculates exhaust from the main engine to the vertical lift system.
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Meanwhile, for Boeing's X-32 STOVL variant, the company has gone with a Harrier-like thrust vectored approach using a single engine and exhaust. This variant also includes thrust posts and roll posts on each wing for control and stability when in STOVL operation. Unfortunately, that design causes hot air from the X-32's exhaust to be recirculated into its modified intake, which weakens the thrust it can produce and leads to overheating issues.
This gave Lockheed's design a huge advantage over Boeing's. "One of the issues that came up was that the Boeing design couldn't do the short takeoff/vertical landing exercise if you will, the test, at Edwards. They had to bring the STOVL planes to Pax. River where the air is relatively thick at sea level to produce more thrust and there is enough margin of safety to ensure that the plane can go around."
Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin has done a demonstration where their STOVL variant does a vertical takeoff, accelerates to supersonic speed, and then makes a vertical landing. "That was one place where we said 'hmm, Lockheed has a performance advantage,'" Yates told Carroll.
It was then that the X-32 test pilot began to feel that the JSF program office would be "difficult to lean toward the Boeing design," for several reasons. "Number one, because what they showed was not their proposed final design. Lockheed was. And the fact that Lockheed's design was better than Boeing's design."
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Yates said there was "great consternation" about the fact that Boeing's initial design was not the same as what was later submitted as their proposal for a production design. In contrast, Yates said, "Lockheed's design is very close to what they submitted" for their production proposal. With Boeing demonstrator against its production
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