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American X-Planes

Research Project

1. Introduction:

1.1 The objective in this research project is to make inform my audience about the different technologies tested in X-planes and about the various reasons of the X-program failures and why these crafts are not brought into production.

1.2 The hypothesis of this project would find out why only two X- crafts made significant contributions to the modern aviation industry (X-32 and X-35).

1.3 The thesis statement would be: There were various causes of failures of the X-projects and only one of these crafts made it to full scale production (X-35).

1.4 The boundaries of this project have been limited to few, key technological contributions by these aircrafts and those only those specifications which have been disclosed by US government and Department of Defense.

2. Methodology:

This research paper has been conducted over a period of eight weeks and various resources have been used during this while. The main source used was NASA's online forum through which access was available to Jenkins, Landis and Miller's summary on this topic. Along with the internet I also browsed through a few books on aviation which were available at the Dubai Public Library and referenced aviation magazines and articles which I got a hold of from the college library. Other sources included few websites, including Wikipedia.



3. Findings:
3.1 Background:

The X-planes are a series of specially built experimental United States aircraft (and some rockets) used for testing of new technologies and usually kept highly secret during development.

The first of these, the Bell X-1, became well-known as the first plane to break the sound barrier. As of 2006, new X-plane projects are still underway. Till date, 52 X-planes have been built (the designation X-52 was skipped and moved on to X-53 to avoid confusion with the B-52 bomber).

3.2 The Failures:
The X-series had a range of failures over the past half decade.
Lack of...