Hermeus Flies Quarterhorse Mk 1 at Edwards Air Force Base

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, CA – Hermeus, a venture capital-backed aerospace and defense technology company specializing in high-speed aircraft, announced today the flight of its Quarterhorse Mk 1 aircraft. This milestone is a significant step in Hermeus’ development of high-Mach and hypersonic aircraft. With this flight, Hermeus demonstrated a rapid development pace, advancing Hermeus’ mission to operationalize hypersonic technologies.

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“Mk 1 has redefined the pace of developing and flying new aircraft,” said Hermeus CEO and Co-Founder, AJ Piplica. “I’m incredibly proud of what our team has accomplished. We’ve proven the viability of our iterative development approach. But this is just the start. We have much more to do as the bar rises for the next iteration.”

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Quarterhorse Mk 1 went from clean sheet to flight-ready in a little over a year. The primary focus of the test campaign was to validate high-speed takeoff and landing of a large uncrewed aircraft. The aircraft's unique configuration — driven by high-speed flight — makes basic operations of takeoff and landing distinctly challenging.

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“Industry partnerships continue to have an important role in the development and test of disruptive and innovative capabilities for our warfighters,” commented Major General Scott Cain, Commander of Air Force Test Center. “The promise of routine hypersonic flight is an exciting capability for the joint team.”

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Data from the campaign has validated design and performance models, including aerodynamics, stability and control. Testing also validated performance of vehicle subsystems including propulsion, fuel systems, hydraulics, power, thermal management, avionics, flight software, telemetry, flight termination, and command and control.

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“The real-world flight data from Mk 1 provides significant technical value that we’re rolling into our next aircraft,” said Co-Founder and President Skyler Shuford. “Moreover, the team has accomplished this milestone on a challenging timeline while operating within the overall aerospace ecosystem — all to support rebuilding America’s lost capability to quickly develop brand-new, full-scale jets.”

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Quarterhorse Mk 1 is the first in a series of uncrewed aircraft on Hermeus’ iterative development roadmap. The company’s approach emphasizes “hardware richness” – building multiple prototypes in quick succession, allowing the team to take well-managed technical risk. While driving technical progress towards high-speed flight, this approach simultaneously enables Hermeus to rapidly develop its team and talent. The “one aircraft per year” development cadence drives Hermeus’ engineers and technicians through multiple crucibles of full life-cycle aircraft development in a very short time period. As a result, the company is progressively building a team capable of solving the hardest engineering challenges of aviation to operationalize hypersonic aircraft.

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The team is actively reviewing data and integrating lessons learned into Hermeus’ next iteration, Quarterhorse Mk 2, currently being manufactured at Hermeus’ headquarters in Atlanta. The scale of an F-16, Quarterhorse Mk 2 is a high-Mach aircraft designed to de-risk uncrewed supersonic flight. It is on-track to fly late this year. This vehicle will enable both high-cadence hypersonic flight test and novel operational defense capabilities.

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