The Scaled Composites ARES is a demonstrator aircraft built by Scaled Composites. ARES is an acronym for Agile Responsive Effective Support.
Development In 1981, U.S. Army Aviators Jim Kreutz and Milo Burroughs undertook a study for a low cost battlefield attack aircraft (LCBAA), as they felt the close air support aircraft available were inadequate to support the U.S. Army operations. They decided that a fixed-wing aircraft with excellent maneuvering capabilities at very low altitudes and resistance to stall would be necessary. Burt Rutan joined their study to design an aircraft to meet the requirements with a two-phase program. The first phase was the preliminary design of LCBAA, while in the second phase the Long EZ aircraft was modified to serve as a technology demonstrator. The original layout was of a low wing canard configuration, aircraft powered by a pusher turboprop, and built around a 30 mm Gatling gun capable of destroying light armored vehicles. It was decided that as much military hardware as possible would be used in the design. When a Pentagon official promised that they would evaluate his aircraft if he built it, he built a demonstrator aircraft in 1986. By this time the aircraft had changed significantly. It retained the general configuration, but now had a single Pratt & Whitney Canada JT15D-5 turbofan engine rather than a turboprop as the propeller was vulnerable to debris kicked up by the nosewheel. A GAU-12/U 25 mm rotary barreled cannon was mounted in the aircraft to the right of the nose in a concave recess under the cockpit. The concave recess trapped gun exhaust gases, creating a pressure buildup in the recess which pushing the aircraft's nose to the left, cancelled the recoil of the large cannon, which otherwise pushed the nose to the right. To prevent exhaust gases from the gun entering the engine intake and reducing engine performance, the engine intake was located on the left side of the nose, opposite the cannon making the aircraft asymmetric. Thrust was redirected to the centerline via a series of ducts, which also reduced the infrared signature. After Beechcraft sold Scaled Composites back to Rutan, he chose to complete the project with company funds. This aircraft was renamed ARES, and first flew on February 19, 1990, piloted by Scaled Composites test pilot Doug Shane. Since then it has flown more than 250 hours, and met its original design specifications for performance and range. In 1991 under US Air Force contract, the ARES 25 mm cannon was installed and during testing the cannon performed well but the ARES remains a private project. After an appearance in the movie Aces: Iron Eagle III as a fictional Me 263 fighter, the aircraft has become a commercially available research test bed. The aircraft was stored in December 2000 at the Mojave Spaceport until Scaled Composites became a Northrop Grumman subsidiary and flown again on March 7, 2008.
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