P-8A Completes High-Speed Wind Tunnel Tests

Released on Wednesday, April 13, 2005

The Boeing company has released that the US Navy's Multi-mission Maritime Aircraft (MMA) completed 1,300 hours of high-speed wind tunnel testing. MMA, which is intended to replace aging P-3 turboprop aircraft fleet, was recently given the designation P-8A.

The wind tunnel testing program lasted for three months and was concluded on March 18. The team led by Boeing conducted the program at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffet Field, California, using a 6.2 percent scale model in the 11-ft transonic wind tunnel.

Boeing officials estimate that more than 4,000 hours of testing in wind tunnel are needed in developing the P-8A aircraft. During this phase technicians used advanced tools such as computational fluid dynamics to refine designs before testing to eliminate a substantial amount of tunnel time required to develop earlier designs.

The Boeing-led industry team includes CFM International, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon and Smiths Aerospace. Up to five aircraft demonstrators will be built during the System Development and Demonstration (SDD) phase. The new aircraft will have such a degree of mission efficiency that only 108 P-8As will be required to replace the current US Navy's fleet of P-3s which is numbered over 200 airplanes.