Silent Arrow today announced that one of the company's original GD-2000 flight test aircraft, tail number N23SA, has been donated and accepted by the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. The 2,000-pound cargo delivery aircraft has arrived at the museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia for accessioning and future public display.
The donated aircraft is a full scale, fully functional, 1-ton autonomous cargo delivery glider that was an integral part of the Silent Arrow flight test program and last flew in Pendleton, Oregon on July 16, 2020 after being dropped from a Bell UH-1H "Huey" from 5,000 feet AGL (8,720 MSL). The GD-2000 product name means "Glider, Disposable, 2,000 pounds" and it is capable of internal or external airborne deployment from rotorcraft or from fixed-wing cargo ramps such as the C-130.
This airframe is significant in that it spent a large portion of its flight inverted, which ultimately required pilot intervention to right the aircraft before returning it to autonomous flight mode after which it made a smooth and successful landing. As a single use, disposable cargo delivery platform, typically the airframes are damaged upon landing in the course of protecting their cargo. However, this autonomous landing resulted in minimal damage and was recovered post flight, repaired and shipped back to Silent Arrow headquarters in Orange County, California.
The serendipitous inverted flight of this test aircraft enabled the Silent Arrow software engineering team to develop an autonomous upset recovery feature which was implemented on all subsequent aircraft and has proven effective during recent C-130 deployments in the U.S. and overseas.
