World's Largest Plane Completes Six-Hour Test Flight
The world's largest airplane has completed a six-hour test flight over California's Mojave Desert.
With a wingspan of 117 meters — almost 40 meters wider than an Airbus A380 — the Stratolaunch Roc is the largest plane to ever fly.
On January 13, 2023, the huge plane completed its longest flight yet from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, reaching a maximum altitude of 6,860 meters.
The Roc — which has two fuselages — is powered by six Boeing 747 engines, and has been designed to carry and launch other vehicles from the sky.
Its most recent flight was the aircraft's ninth test, during which it carried Stratolaunch's Talon-A between its two fuselages.
The Talon-A, with a wingspan of just 3.4 meters, is a rocket-powered vehicle designed to collect data on the effects of hypersonic flight, as it travels as fast as six times the speed of sound.
While any vehicle that moves faster than the speed of sound — 1,225 kilometers per hour — is known as "supersonic," those that fly at least five times the speed of sound are called "hypersonic."
Although these extremely fast vehicles can be launched from the ground, launching them from the air is less complicated and saves fuel for high-speed flight at high altitudes.
Air launches are actually quite common for hypersonic vehicles. In the 1950s and 1960s, the X-15, a rocket-powered test aircraft developed in the US, was launched from B-52 military aircraft. The X-15 flew as fast as 6.7 times the speed of sound — still a world record for a rocket-powered, manned aircraft.
Stratolaunch is a private company founded in 2011 by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. However, it only completed its first flight in April 2019, six months after Allen died of cancer.
