![\"LightningStrike\"](\"http:\/\/breakingdefense.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2016\/05\/LightningStrike-300x232.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
WEST PALM BEACH,\u00a0 Fla.: Army experts are \u201cextremely excited\u201d by the idea of hybrid electric aircraft, one of the service\u2019s top Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) experts revealed Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy team has believed that was the case for some time,\u201d Lars Ericsson, chief of the technical management division in the Army UAS office, said\u00a0on a panel at the American Helicopter Society International\u2019s annual conference here.\u00a0\u201cWhat we\u2019re extremely excited to watch are the number\u00a0 of S&T (science and technology) programs advancing the technology.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ericsson cited three experimental hybrid electric aircraft programs now underway:<\/p>\n
- \n
- DARPA\u2019s Vertical Takeoff and Landing Experimental Aircraft program, known as VTOL X-Plane<\/a>, in which Aurora Flight Sciences of Manassas, Va., is building an unmanned hybrid technology demonstrator called LightningStrike. The odd-looking plane will use a conventional turbine engine to power three 1 megawatt electric generators powering 24 electric motor-driven ducted fans in a tilting wing and a tilting canard.<\/li>\n
- The Great Horned Owl Program (GHO), an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)<\/a>\u00a0effort\u00a0to develop, as the IARPA web site describes it, \u201ctechnologies that significantly extend the operational endurance and payload capabilities of ISR UAVs (intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles).\u201d \u00a0The first phase of the GHO program is developing \u201ca propulsion system that will quietly generate electrical power from liquid hydrocarbon fuel,\u201d the web site explains.<\/li>\n
- NASA\u2019s GL-10 Greased Lightning, a technology demonstrator aircraft that uses ten electric propellers on a 10-foot tilting wing to take off and land vertically and fly like an airplane.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
A number of other U.S. and foreign companies are working on such \u201cdistributed electric propulsion\u201d and \u201chybrid electric\u201d aircraft, which are designed to escape the severe limitations of batteries that make pure electric aircraft of any size impractical by using conventional power plants to generate their electricity.<\/p>\n
- The Great Horned Owl Program (GHO), an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)<\/a>\u00a0effort\u00a0to develop, as the IARPA web site describes it, \u201ctechnologies that significantly extend the operational endurance and payload capabilities of ISR UAVs (intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles).\u201d \u00a0The first phase of the GHO program is developing \u201ca propulsion system that will quietly generate electrical power from liquid hydrocarbon fuel,\u201d the web site explains.<\/li>\n