From Falcon 9 to fighter jets: the former SpaceX engineer behind Shield AI’s vertical landing X-Bat

Armor Harris is the technical force behind Shield AI’s vertical take-off and landing X-Bat combat jet, leveraging experience developing SpaceX rocket boosters that land automatically.

As the global aerospace industry moves into the sixth-generation era of combat aircraft, marked by radical tailless designs and tactical fighters that fly themselves, one new jet stands as especially revolutionary.

The X-Bat prototype from American defence technology start-up Shield AI combines the latest low-observable shape and autonomous flight capabilities in an unorthodox package: a single-engined jet that takes off and lands vertically from a mobile rail system using thrust vectoring.

The idea is to provide a modern tactical fighter that can operate without fixed, well-maintained runways; a type that can be deployed to small forward bases and ship decks throughout an area of operations.

That radical concept was envisioned not by a general or defence industry executive but by an engineer who cut his teeth developing rockets for orbital launch company SpaceX.

“All credit due to Armor Harris,” Shield AI co-founder Brandon Tseng had told FlightGlobal in May.

Harris is Shield AI’s senior vice-president overseeing aircraft development programmes. Tseng describes him as the “inventor” of the X-Bat. Before joining the autonomy start-up, Harris was a propulsion engineer at SpaceX and head engineer on the Starlink satellite communications project.

Shield AI, which has been displaying a one-fifth-scale mock-up of its X-Bat at defence conferences, aims to log a first prototype flight by end-2026 and accelerate to a full test campaign in 2027. Source: FlightGlobal

A key component of the Starlink programme is the reusable Falcon 9 rocket booster, which can carry payloads into low Earth orbit and return safely to the ground, landing upright using rocket engines that can then be reused – substantially lowering the cost of launches.

Falcon 9s can land on the same pad from which they launched or at other locations like barges at sea. With the X-Bat, Harris is seeking to port that concept to the world of tactical aviation.

In a September interview, Harris described to FlightGlobal his operational vision for the X-Bat, while revealing Shield AI’s test and certification plan and why he thinks an autonomous VTOL fighter is the right tool for a pressing tactical problem facing military planners.

“We were basically trying to solve the hardest problem that we face today, which is that our primary adversary, China, can generally outproduce us,” Harris says. “The West has been investing in ever-more exquisite stealth aircraft that are survivable in the air. But what have our adversaries done? They’ve invested in a bunch of long-range missiles that hold [the stealth aircraft] vulnerable on the ground.”

“That B-2 that’s sitting on the tarmac is a lot more vulnerable on the ground than it is in the sky,” he adds.

That thesis was repeatedly confirmed in the Middle East this year when Iranian long-range missiles and drones damaged multiple US Air Force aircraft on the ground. Losses included the total destruction of one Boeing E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control jet, multiple Boeing KC-135 tankers and reparable damage to eight Boeing F-15E fighters.

Tseng says one question drove the X-Bat design: “How do you create geographically distributed long-range fires with very, very low cost per effect against an adversary like China?”

Core to X-Bat’s survivability-on-the-ground pitch is its ability to “drive away from where you landed faster than adversaries”, Harris says.

That concept has demonstrated merit in Ukraine, first with artillery crews and later with drone operators firing volleys and then rapidly evacuating to avoid counterfire. Ukraine has managed to keep its fleet of non-stealthy fighter aircraft from being destroyed on the ground by never landing where they took off.

Harris notes that keeping X-Bats from destruction on the ground could be as simple as staging their mobile launch containers on other parts of an airbase, away from runways and hangars.

“You can operate from the golf course. You can operate from just inside the fence line. You’re just staying away from the places that are going to get targeted from those incoming missiles,” he says.

Radical departure or mostly conventional?

In terms of engineering, the X-Bat will likely be unlike that for any aircraft – combining a novel approach to vertical take-off and landing and a mostly experimental thrust vectoring system, all controlled by autonomous flight software without any inputs from a human pilot.

However, despite its seemingly radical appearance, Harris says much of the X-Bat’s design is fairly straightforward, taken from a conventional fighter jet.

“The design of the aircraft is actually incredibly conventional,” he says. “The propulsion train is very similar to an F-16. The structural design of the aircraft is very conventional. Everything we’re doing for [low observability] is all stuff that’s been done before.”

Like the F-16, the X-Bat will use a single GE Aerospace F110 turbofan. This will be supplemented by the Axisymmetric Vectoring Exhaust Nozzle (AVEN) system that GE developed in the 1990s to add thrust vectoring to F-16s. That system was never fielded operationally.

GE and Shield AI have already launched engine stand testing on an AVEN-equipped F110, which will use omnidirectional thrust vectoring to stabilise the X-Bat during vertical landing.

The Axisymmetric Vectoring Exhaust Nozzle system is being tested with an F110 engine at GE’s Peebles, Ohio site. Source: Shield AI

One area the X-Bat is breaking ground is in jet-powered vertical take-off and landing capability from a tail-sitting position. With that in mind, much of the test campaign will focus on that portion of flight.

“The area that we’re really wanting to science is take-off and landing in close proximity to the ground,” Harris notes. “The transition in and transition out – from horizontal to vertical – is not necessarily that concerning because there are lots of ways you can do it. It’s basically just a question of how much performance do you want to eat.”

The X-Bat trials will notably feature one piece of kit not commonly deployed for flight testing new aircraft. “We have one of the biggest cranes in the world up in Kansas at our flight-test range,” Harris says.

This will be used to test fire X-Bat prototypes while suspended, allowing Shield AI to safely refine the jet’s stability and control laws in the tricky vertical-flight orientation.

“We’ll hang the aircraft from the crane and then hover it around while it’s tethered to the crane to work out any of the kinks. We can test a lot of the different points related to the ascent/descent trajectory because we basically hang the airplane in different spots relative to the launch recovery vehicle,” Harris says. “Then we take the crane away and then do free flights after that.”

Shield AI

Source: www.flightglobal.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.