A US Air Force B-52 carries the X-51 Hypersonic Vehicle out to the range for a launch test from Edwards AFB, California.
An experimental US plane has broken the record for hypersonic flight, hitting a top speed of Mach 5.1 during a flight that lasted more than six minutes, an Air Force official said.
The unmanned X-51A Waverider took off on Wednesday from Edwards Air Force Base and travelled 230 nautical miles (426km) in what was the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight ever.
After exhausting its 240-second fuel supply, the vehicle continued to send back telemetry data until it splashed down into the ocean and was destroyed as designed. All told, 370 seconds of data was collected from the experiment.
“It was a full mission success,” Charlie Brink, X-51A programme manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory Aerospace Systems Directorate said in a statement. “I believe all we have learned from the X-51A Waverider will serve as the bedrock for future hypersonics research and ultimately the practical application of hypersonic flight.”
The flight was the last of four test flights of the $300mn research programme to prove the viability of air-breathing, high-speed scramjet propulsion.