Lockheed Martin

Most U.S. pilots know there’s an FAR restricting a civil aircraft from exceeding the speed of sound over land thanks to the annoying boom that people on the ground experience when one flies nearby. Over the next few months, NASA believes successful wind-tunnel testing of a 9 percent scale model of Lockheed Martin’s X-plane, at […]

Lockheed Martin’s first LM-100J Super Hercules made its debut last week as employees walked the first model out of its production facility in Marietta, Georgia, marking a milestone in the aircraft’s production. The company has filed for an FAA civil type certificate, and this first LM-100J will undergo flight-testing as part of the process. Its […]

President-elect Donald Trump is at it again. He took to Twitter on Monday morning to criticize the cost of the Defense Department’s most expensive weapons program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Trump called the cost of the F-35 program “out of control,” driving jet builder Lockheed Martin’s stock price down 4 percent by midday and […]

Most people know the term hypersonic, but few can probably define it. Hypersonic flight occurs when an object travels at speeds in excess of five times the speed of sound, or about 3,800 mph in dry air at sea level. At last month’s Forum on American Aeronautics held at the Mojave Air and Space Port, […]

SpaceX has won its first military contract — $82.7 million to send a U.S. Air Force Global Positioning System satellite into space — breaking a long-held Boeing-Lockheed monopoly on military space launches. The aerospace company, founded by CEO Elon Musk, will launch the Air Force’s next generation GPS satellite in May 2018. The contract reintroduces […]

Watch out, Aerion. There may be some competition in the development of supersonic passenger airplanes in the not so distant future. NASA announced yesterday that it has awarded a $20 million contract to Lockheed Martin for the primary design of a commercially viable supersonic flight demonstrator aircraft. The ultimate goal is to produce a supersonic […]

Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works has revealed plans for a new hypersonic spy plane that would be capable of flying at Mach 6, making it the fastest airplane ever and obviating the need for stealth technology because nothing on the planet would be capable of catching it. Designed as a replacement for the super-speedy SR-71 […]

Flight test crews at Lockheed Martin have hit some milestones this month as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program slowly progresses. At the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland on May 10, the F-35B short-takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) Lightning II test airplane completed its first vertical takeoff — a flight that also included a vertical […]

The Blue Angels take this C-130 through its paces with wild air show maneuvers.

When governments buy airplanes, they face many of the same constraints that we do. If it is a new airplane, it takes a long time to develop. And, the fewer engines the airplane has, the more affordable it can be. The next generation fighters, the F-22 and the F-35 (Joint Strike Fighter) are perfect examples […]