Component To Arrive By Super Guppy December 11

A representative test article of a futuristic hybrid wing body aircraft  will be delivered Thursday, Dec. 11 at the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

The large test article, representing the uniquely shaped fuselage cross-section, is made out of a low-weight, damage-tolerant, stitched composite structural concept called Pultruded Rod Stitched Efficient Unitized Structure, or PRSEUS. Langley's Combined Loads Test System will subject the revolutionary carbon-fiber architecture test article to conditions that simulate loads typically encountered in flight.

The test article will be unloaded from NASA’s Super Guppy aircraft early Thursday morning.

Structural testing at Langley is one of eight, large-scale integrated technology demonstrations designed to further the goals of NASA's Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) project to reduce aircraft fuel consumption, noise levels and emissions through revolutionary design and manufacture of tomorrow’s aircraft.

The hybrid wing body structural technology test article was built for NASA by Boeing Research & Technology in Huntington Beach, California, and assembled in Long Beach. NASA worked with The Boeing Company and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to develop the PRSEUS structural concept.

(NASA Guppy image from file)

FMI: www.nasa.gov/aeronautics