Landing an unmanned aircraft flying at more than five times the speed of sound on a standard runway is not easy, but Chinese military researchers say they have found a way to make it safer, potentially bringing the application of hypersonic flight one step closer, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported Sept. 7.
In a paper published Sept. 1 in the journal Tactical Missile Technology, Fei Dai of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force and colleagues said they have improved their classification model based on hypersonic drones. Their work appears to confirm the existence of a Chinese hypersonic drone program. It is unclear whether the drones Dai’s team used are in development or in use.
The DR-8 or Wuzhen 8 (WZ-8) spy drone was unveiled at a military parade in Beijing two years ago, and while it is generally believed to be faster than the speed of sound, it is still uncertain whether it is a hypersonic drone. Wang Xing, a professor at China’s Air Force Engineering University, said at an academic conference in Xi’an in 2020 that hypersonic drones could potentially be used against U.S. stealth aircraft such as the F-22 and F-35.
The Wuzhen 8 is a high-altitude, high-speed reconnaissance drone developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute of China Aviation Industry Corporation. The aircraft is about 13 meters long, with a wingspan of about 4.5 meters and a maximum takeoff weight of 5 tons, and is equipped with two liquid rocket engines. Experts have been quoted in the media as speculating that the Wuzhen 8 can fly at an altitude of 40,000 meters. According to the analysis of military experts, the Wuzhen 8 drone can be used not only for ocean reconnaissance, but also for “sea-to-land” reconnaissance, or shuttle reconnaissance across islands.
Stealth technology is redundant in close combat, Wang Xing said, adding that no stealth aircraft can hide itself after firing a missile or dropping a bomb. A hypersonic drone deployed by China’s land-based air defense system could catch up with an F-22 in seconds – it could fly home at more than twice the speed of sound after launching an attack, he said.
Some countries have proposed increasing the capability of airborne computers, but that doesn’t cut it, PLA Air Force researchers said. Instead, they worked with Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics to improve the software to better predict possible landing scenarios.
The report also said there are no civilian applications for hypersonic flight technology, but China plans to build civilian hypersonic aircraft. By 2035, such a plane could carry 10 passengers anywhere on Earth in about an hour, according to the Chinese space authority.
And a mysterious new space and earth round-trip vehicle and a hypersonic vehicle came to light earlier when China’s CCTV news reported on the latest progress of the JF-22 hypervelocity wind tunnel.
The new hypersonic vehicle shown in the report can reach up to Mach 12, or more than 4,000 meters per second. The text next to it shows the words “suction power”, “maneuvering flight” and “global reach”.
Jiang Zonglin, a researcher at the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the head of the Huairou Excitation Wind Tunnel Project, said that if a hypersonic vehicle is made, say, to fly in the atmosphere at 5 to 10 times the speed of sound, it can be reached anywhere in the world in one or two hours.