Boeing’s MQ-25 Tanker Drone Trucked To Air Base Near St. Louis For Flight Testing
The exotic looking carrier-based drone is heading to MidAmerica Airport on the outskirts of St. Louis to begin its ground and air test program.
The exotic looking carrier-based drone is heading to MidAmerica Airport on the outskirts of St. Louis to begin its ground and air test program.
The sad thing is, the whole idea originally was for the Navy to get a stealth drone, but it ended up getting a flying gas can.
Boeing’s MQ-25 has a classically problematic but low-observable flush-mounted intake, yet there are no low-observable requirements for the program.
There’s plenty of paid for S-3s that can be converted to do the job and a dedicated Viking tanker variant has already been engineered and flown.
The famed drone manufacturer has come out with an impressive, no-nonsense flying gas truck. But will the lack of a prototype hurt its chances?
Lockheed’s flying-wing ‘Stingray’ drone is said to be largely a clean sheet design, and that could help or hurt its chances of winning.
As we suspected, it was designed years ago for a more ambitious program and has since been adapted to meet the Navy’s carrier-based tanker needs.
The images give us our first view of the entire aircraft, as well as a sense of its overall scale.
We get our first look from different angles of Boeing Phantom Works’ MQ-25 Stingray design, and some exotic features are coming into focus.
After teasing the reveal on social media, we finally get our first peak at the company’s clean-sheet, aircraft carrier-borne, unmanned tanker design.