Jane Edwards
Boeing’s Aurora Flight Sciences subsidiary has received a potential $42.2 million contract to perform work on the next phase of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program that seeks to demonstrate an aircraft design based on active flow control.
Aurora will work on the second and third phases of the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors program in Virginia, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Connecticut, Mississippi, Missouri, California, Arizona, Texas, Maryland and Utah through September 2025, the Department of Defense said Wednesday.
DARPA is obligating $6.5 million in fiscal 2022 research and development funds.
In 2020, Aurora was one of the three companies selected to come up with conceptual active flow control designs under Phase 0 of the CRANE program.
The agency defines AFC as a technology that uses energy to maintain or improve an aircraft’s aerodynamic performance.
In August 2021, DARPA gave the Boeing subsidiary and Lockheed Martin the go-ahead to kick off the program’s Phase 1, which includes initial design work, system requirements development, software development and initial airworthiness efforts that lead up to a preliminary design review.
