Boeing would not comment the artist rendering on display on their booth at the show, but the company provided Naval News with the following statement:
“The weapon concept shown at Navy League Sea-Air-Space is a stand-in representation of Boeing’s HyFly2 hypersonic cruise missile design. While the actual outer mold design is not releasable, we continue to advance our hypersonic weapon design expertise and apply it to meet the needs of a quickly evolving future where hypersonics will play a key role.”
“Boeing continues to invest in this area, and we are focused on developing and maturing key technologies for both commercial and defense applications. We’re currently engaged with propulsion risk reduction, as well as working toward a System Requirements Review, to be followed by the Preliminary Design Review.”
Apart from this statement, Boeing would not disclose too many details, but according to Aviation Week news website’s article, the U.S. Defense Department inserted Boeing into a competition to build a Mach 6 dual-combust cruise missile, the HyFly 2 program in october 2020.The Pentagon funded a preliminary design review and ground testing of the dual-combustion ramjet.
The new contract for HyFly 2 comes as the U.S. Navy prepares to make a decision in fiscal 2022 on a future hypersonic cruise missile. The HyFly 2 could join two other options in development by teams from Lockheed Martin/Aerojet, whose conceptual hypervelocity cruise missile was unveiled at SAS 2019, and Raytheon Technologies/Northrop Grumman for the DARPA’s (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) program.
HyFly 2 follows on initial Boeing HyFly program, a joint DARPA and U.S. Navy program that produced a demonstrator optimized for the F/A-18E/F and which resulted in three failed flight tests between 2007 and 2010.
