Hermeus Completes Testing of Quarterhorse Mk 0 Vehicle

Quarter Horse Mark Zero is our first fully integrated vehicle. Not just from a hardware perspective, but from a company perspective. It is the first time that all of the teams have come together. Everything from structures, propulsion, fluids, avionics, the engine, the flight test team, working with regulators. Everything has to come together in this vehicle. So that's from a company perspective, from the technical perspective. The purpose of this vehicle is to do low speed taxi. The team put this vehicle together in less than six months, basically from design concept to the vehicle we tested. That's the way that Hermes works. We work to iterate and integrate vehicles very fast to get to the next integration. Mainly what we're trying to do with this particular quarter horse op is to crawl. That's what the Mark Zero was built to do, is teach us how to be a team, but also teach us about systems of systems and how good we are with our design and our analyses. The hardware is going to talk to you and it's going to tell us things and we're going to learn things. Or we can wait six months and try to do a lot more analysis. But the hardware is still going to talk to us. I just want to hear it sooner. This is the first time that we've done a deployed test operation, and so it's the first time that our flight test team has been able to operate. The team has to learn each other. We talk a lot about crew resource management, which is how the team works in a dynamic environment. And there's so many pieces of it. So you have the ground crew that are going to take care of the vehicle. You have the flight crew that's going to be in the flight deck. You have ground support equipment that's got to operate together or in concert with the rest of the system of systems. The more the team works together and establishes what their battle rhythm is, the much smoother flight test will go. So the purpose of the quarter horse program is to fly the Chimera engine, demonstrate mode transition in flight and break the first air speed record in almost 50 years. That's still held by the SR-71 from 1976. So it's really a significant, significant thing to go after. And it's a really hard thing to do. So for us, you know, the approach that we're taking is very iterative. So we're not just going to build a mode transition vehicle right off the bat. The key here is baking in a robust and risk tolerant approach. If we decided to try to build the fastest aircraft in the world as our first aircraft with all the uncertainties that exist, the uncertainties drive it to a point where it doesn't really close. We set a very, very appropriately scoped set of requirements around something. And because we're not doing anything else, we can execute very quickly and then focus each amount of work, each iteration on a set of risks. And this is really the only way to start pushing boundaries again in a way that we haven't in decades. I kind of like to think that we're taking it back a generation to when the Skunk Works was new, to when Phantom Works was new. And we're taking those ideas and we're taking those principles of agility and speed and applying them to what we do now so that we can move forward safely, but yet effectively and rapidly. So Quarter Horse Mark Zero, this this project within the overall Quarter Horse program has been executed on really, really rapidly. About six months from close of the top level requirements for the vehicle to rolling the vehicle out of the factory here. More impressive, though, was the test campaign from the time the aircraft arrived at at the test facility to when we completed this test campaign was about 37 days, which is kind of ridiculous to think that you can go from not moving at all to a fully integrated system operating on an Air Force base with something you can measure in days versus months or years. That's the pace that's required to deliver on the rate of iteration that we need to solve this problem overall.