Boeing's Phantom Works: Shaping the Future

Advancing the Boeing group's competitiveness through technology development, process improvement, and new product development, is the brief of former USAF Lt. Gen. and Vietnam combat veteran George Muellner, president of Boeing Phantom Works, from HQ in Seattle.

With just under 5,000 people, this innovative arm of Boeing is exploring a wide variety of technologies, with a special focus on making products both more affordable and capable.

Some of the Phantom Works' current key programs listed by Muellner at Le Bourget include:

• Advanced Theater Transport, or ATT: Long-term studies of a C-17-size, forward-swept four-turboprop tilt-wing STOL tactical transport, with no vertical tail, to lift an 80,000-pound payload over 3,000 nmi, from 750-foot unprepared strips.
• Canard rotor/wing (CRW) Dragonfly: With the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Boeing is building two unmanned air technology demonstrators to evaluate a new hybrid helicopter/fixed-wing concept. DARPA seeks a jet-efflux tip-driven wide-chord rotor, requiring no anti-torque inputs, for vertical flight modes. Transition to forward flight results in the rotor becoming a fixed wing, with full jet thrust available to cruise at 400 knots or more. Flight trials will start from Mesa later this year or early next.
• Blended wing body, BWB: Studies of a tail-less delta with rear-mounted dorsal turbofans, offering greater lift and fuselage volume, with less drag, allowing a high degree of commonality, apart from outer wings, for civil or military transport/tankers with the former carrying 280 to 800 passengers, or more. Following successful flight trials of a 17-foot span remotely-controlled model, a 35-foot span 1,800-pound version is being built at NASA's Langley Research Center, to fly on low-speed trials from 2003-2004.

Boeing's Phantom Works is also involved in an unrivalled range of current X-designated flight vehicles, of which the piloted X-31 VECTOR has been flying since October 1989 on research into controlled high angle of attack and extreme maneuverability flight trials. It is now starting approach and landing trials at speeds below 100 knots at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River, Maryland.

Vertical flight trials are just about to start with Boeing's X-32B JSF demonstrator. Roll-out from the Phantom Works of the Mach 25 X-37 low-cost unpiloted reusable space vehicle for NASA is scheduled later this year. As an 85% scale version of the X-37, Boeing's X-40A, has been flying since 1998, and recently concluded seven drop-test flights from a CH-47 Chinook.

Under a $131 million DARPA cost-share agreement, flight development is about to start at Edwards AFB of two Phantom Works X-45A stealthy tailless unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs), carrying 3,000-pound payloads.