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.
“One of the aerospace industry’s emergent challenges is deploying autonomous technologies for the movement of cargo and materials,” said Aeronautics Department Curator Dr. Roger Connor. “We are excited to add this important flight test aircraft, that demonstrates a distinct and unique approach to solving unmanned delivery, to our collection.”
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.
“It’s an unbelievable honor to have one of our hard-working flight test aircraft make it into the Smithsonian,” said Chip Yates, Silent Arrow’s Founder and CEO. “From inauspicious beginnings towing early prototypes with a trailer for data gathering to the present-day C-130, C-17 and A400M deployment programs we have, I am proud of the Silent Arrow team for achieving this milestone.”
About Silent Arrow
The Silent Arrow® product line consists of five attritable, autonomous cargo delivery aircraft capable of carrying 350 to 2,000 pounds of emergency, disaster relief and humanitarian response supplies anywhere in the world on short notice. The Silent Arrow GD-2000, Widebody, SA-PGB, CLS-200 and CLS-300 provide a wide array of contested logistics capabilities to the warfighter. Silent Arrow’s engineering team has been awarded more than 22 patents, 6 Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) aircraft world records and 2 FAI Louis Bleriot medals for disruptive contributions to the aerospace industry. In 2021 Silent Arrow® was selected as a finalist for the Robert J. Collier Trophy as the “Greatest Achievement in Aeronautics or Astronautics in America,” and in 2024 a Silent Arrow flight test aircraft, N23SA, was accepted into the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
For more information visit www.Silent-Arrow.com.
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