Mysterious UAV Exposed by Lockheed Martin After Years of Secrecy

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Lockheed Martin has revealed the existence of a formerly secret UAV.  Although the X-44A’s existence is no longer a secret, Lockheed is not yet prepared to offer many details beyond the year of its first flight and its role as a demonstrator for a family of UAVs.

In 2001, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works secretly flew a flying wing unmanned air vehicle (UAV) with a roughly 9m (30ft) wingspan with modular wings and a bulbous fuselage as a technology demonstrator for a family of aircraft.

The project bears the hallmarks of many Lockheed Skunk Works projects, including a name possibly intended to cause confusion. For two decades, the X-44A designation was thought to be assigned only to a NASA proposal for an X-plane. NASA’s late-1990s proposal, never consummated, called for testing a Lockheed F-22 with a trapezoidal wing and no vertical tails. Why the X-44A designation was secretly reassigned to the Skunk Works UAV project is not clear.

According to flightglobal.com, based on the designation and timing of first flight, Lockheed’s X-44A appears to pre-date the launch of a series of rival X-plane demonstrators, including Boeing’s X-45A that flew in 2002 and Northrop Grumman’s X-47A.

As a seemingly modular flying wing with a bulbous body, the X-44A appears to belong to the same family of UAV designs as the Polecat and the RQ-170 from the mid-2000s, rather than the AARS and RQ-3 from the 1980s and 1990s.