An exchange during a think-tank event in Washington on July 29 may offer an explanation for the absence of a promised U.S. Air Force hypersonic flight test in July. 

“Did we balk on a [hypersonic] test run last week?” John Venable, senior research fellow for Defense Policy at the Heritage Foundation, asked Mark Lewis, the newly announced executive director of the Emerging Technologies Institute (ETI). 

“So,” Lewis replied, “this is what I’ve heard. I have no confirmation of that. But, yeah, and it’s kind of — again, it’s all kind of frustrating."
Lewis, a scientist of hypersonic flight and former director of Defense Research and Engineering at the Defense Department, was the guest speaker at a Heritage event focused on the U.S. position in a hypersonic arms race with China and Russia. 

An Aviation Week journalist asked Lewis and Venable, the moderator, about what was causing a series of unexplained delays and botched attempts at testing the Air Force’s AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) and the DARPA/Air Force Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC). Although scheduled for first flights in 2019, neither program has performed a successful flight test. 

A navigational warning released by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in early July alerted vessels to the possibility of two windows for a long-range missile test on the Pacific Test Range between California and Hawaii. The windows opened on July 10 and closed on July 21. Later, the Defense Department made no announcement about completing a missile test during the two windows.

A month earlier, Gen. Timothy Ray, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command, told lawmakers the ARRW program would test the AGM-183A in July, but the Air Force has so far made no announcement about such an event with two days left in the month.  

“If there have been successes there you probably would have been hearing the cheering all the way from Edwards Air Force Base,” Lewis said. “And, you know, we saw a series of flight test failures that ... I put in the category of embarrassing failures.”

The Air Force has said that an AGM-183A test vehicle failed to separate from its B-52 launch aircraft during an April 5 attempt to test the missile’s booster rocket. The HAWC program has reportedly suffered two flight test failures of a similar nature in as many attempts. 

“There's several factors [involved],” Lewis explained. “One is we don't do it enough, and we have forgotten how to do it. There's a science but there's also an art to flight test. And if you don't do it often enough, [you] forget how to do that.”

Hypersonic technology has progressed dramatically in the last two decades, Lewis said, but flight testing at hypersonic speeds still carries the risk of failure. 

“We are so risk averse,” Lewis said. “There are so many people now who can say ‘no.’ And then, of course, we battle with priorities on the flight test range. It's really a frustrating situation and it's something that frankly I think we really need to address, and we really need to fix.

“We need to be flying early, and we need to fly often, and that's why I'll come back to we need repeated access into the hypersonic flight corridor,” Lewis said. “We should be ashamed of ourselves.”