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AURORA & BEYOND 

Paul Czysz on Hypersonic Aircraft 

By Tim Ventura & Paul Czysz, July 26th, 2006 

It’s a name that evokes awe in the aerospace 

industry – Aurora, a Mach-6 hypersonic aircraft 

that nobody’s sure exists. We join hypersonic 

pioneer Paul Czsyz for the inside scoop on Aurora 

and a next-generation Mach-15 successor that 

may be capable of even reaching space… 

AAG: Two weeks ago, an Air Force officer 

told me that a colleague of his paid a visit to 

one of the big R&D test-bases in the early 90’s 

and saw a high-dollar budget item for 

“Aurora” on a financial report. He thinks that 

this Mach-6 hypersonic aircraft exists, but he 

isn’t sure – what do you think? 

Czysz: It could exist. There’s no magic 

required to build it. I was convinced that the 

group I was with at McDonnell-Douglas in 

the mid-60’s could have built it back then. 

We built two hypersonic aircraft models for 

Mel Buck over at Wright-Patterson that we 

tested for pressure measurements, force 

measurements, and thermal mapping to get 

the heat-transfer rates. Those models went in 

every tunnel we could find – from the lowspeed 

tunnels all the way up to the Mach-6 

and 8 tunnels. We had over 1,300 hours of 

wind-tunnel test-time on those models… 

AAG: So at least technically, Aurora could 

be part of our military arsenal, then. Have 

you ever seen any evidence that aircraft like 

this might really be in service today? 

Czysz: If they were built, and that’s the 

big question. I’ve had strange calls in the 

evening by people who were telling me, “I 

used to work with you, and I’m standing next 

to the aircraft that you’d recognize”, and then 

they hung up. I think the rumor mill is 

probably right about Aurora. 


Paul Czsyz at STAIF 2006 

AAG: Those strange calls make sense, 

though, in the context of your remarkable 

background in hypersonic aerospace 

engineering, culminating in your role as the 

chief scientist for the National Aerospace 

Plane project, touted by Reagan as the 

successor to the Space-Shuttle after the 

Challenger tragedy in 1986. 

Czysz: Well, I started out at Wright- 

Patterson in 1958, but when Sputnik went up 

we were all re-assigned: in my case, to a hightemperature 

hypersonic wind-tunnel, working 

with the people from the Flight Dynamics Lab. 

Mel Buck was one of the fellows in charge of 

the aircraft side of things, and Dick Newman 

and Al Draper were on the hypersonic-glider 

side, working on the type of vehicles we call 

spacecraft today. 

When I left in ’63 and went to work for 

McDonnell Aircraft Company, one of the first 

things that I got involved with was their 

hypersonic impulse tunnel, and we were doing 

some Mach 12 testing of one of the vehicles I 

was working on at Wright-Field. 

In ’66 I joined the advanced design group over 

at McDonnell, and one of the projects that I 

was working on was a Mach 6 hypersonic 

vehicle that would fly unrefueled in a combat 

situation about 1,500 nautical miles, with 

about a 4,000 nautical mile overall range. 

There were a couple of different versions of it 

– one was to shoot down submarine launched 

ballistic missiles launched off the coast of the 

United States, and the other one was 

essentially to interdict soviet ships that were 

coming through the GIUK gap. 

If you launch a Mach 6 interceptor out of 

something like the New York area, by the time 

it gets to the GIUK gap, even the fastest soviet 

ships could not have moved more than about 

10 miles. So using the last known position of 

the ship provided by even simple radar 

contact, the aircraft can pull a 3.5 gee turn, it 

can fly a circle around the last known contact 

point to find the ship that it’s looking for. 


That’s not a difficult maneuver for this aircraft – in fact, a Mach 6 interceptor burns less fuel in a 

3.5 gee turn than the F-15 does at full-afterburner. So you’ve an aircraft that can rapidly reach 

the ship’s last known location and fly a circle around the last known contact point – whether or 

not ship has changed direction, it’s still going to be inside that search radius, making this a 

highly effectively quick-response weapon. 

AAG: Well in terms of the hypersonic concept, 

I’m wondering if this originated out of the need to 

outrun enemy missiles. Apparently the strategy of 

the U-2 was simply to fly higher, and I’m 

wondering if Aurora is attempting to fly faster as 

another solution to the problem? 

Czysz: It’s not about outrunning missiles – it’s 

about response time. In other words, at flank 

speed, a cruiser like the Kirov can run at about 32 

knots, which is 32 nautical miles per hour. The 

horizon for a ship is about 6 miles away, so you 

have to be up in an aircraft to see it – so if you’re 

going to detect it, you have to get there before the 

ship travels too far. 

Aurora: An artist’s rendering of the secret 

Mach 6 to 8 aircraft flown out of Area 51. 

AAG: In other words, you have an increasing radius for the ship’s probable location, and if 

you have a response time that might be 4 to 6 hours to reach the last known contact point, it 

becomes that much harder to find it. 

Czysz: Yes, with a slow response time, you’ll never find it – the ship will be completely out 

of your search range. However, if you can get there in 45 minutes or an hour and a half, then the 

ship will still be inside the circle that you fly around its last known position. 

Now the other application for this Mach 6 aircraft is intercepting ballistic missiles. If a 

submarine pops up just off the coast and launches a ballistic missile, if you have a the right kind 

of Mach 6 aircraft with a good hypersonic kill missile, then you can still hit that ballistic missile 

while it’s climbing, so you can use it to help protect the United States from nuclear attack. 

There were a whole bunch of applications – these were powered by air-turbo ramjets, both Pratt 

& GE designs – we had vehicles that went all the way from a Mach 4 deck-launched interceptor 

for the Navy to vehicles that went all the way up to Mach 12. These ended up in a study for NASA 

called the “Hypersonic Research Facilities Study”, 

which essentially was a comparison between 

ground-test facilities and flight-test facilities to see 

which ones give you the most information to build 

an operational high-speed aircraft. The flight-test 

vehicle won hands-down, because the ground-test 

facilities were so expensive, and they could only 

work on a fraction of the problem. 

Blended Body: In a hypersonic vehicle, the 

bottom of the aircraft is basically the engine. 

AAG: Out of curiousity, in terms of actual, 

tested aircraft, what’s the fastest speed that they’ve 

ever gotten a hypersonic aircraft up to? 


Czysz: We don’t know, because at least publicly we never completed the hypersonic facilities 

study – but there were programs in existence inside the classified community that may have 

taken the research farther than we did. The X-7, which was a Lockheed scramjet research vehicle 

that recovered itself with a long spike sticking in the sand over in the desert supposedly 

exceeded Mach 7 or 8. 

My group actually tested engines in aircraft past Mach 12 – we had data on some of our 

hypersonic glide vehicles when the tunnels were still operating all the way to Mach 20 or 22 

down in Tullahoma. 

AAG: Now you’ve talked about losing 

test-pilots during this process also, right? I 

remember you saying something about the 

aerodynamics being very counterintuitive at 

hypersonic speeds... 

Czysz: No, no – we didn’t actually lose 

test-pilots – I was referring to the 

aerodynamics during training in a 

hypersonic flight simulator. The bottom of 

the aircraft in a Mach 8 to 12 scramjet is the 

engine. Now the way you get an engine to 

put out more thrust is to increase the 

capture area of the engine – that’s how you 

get the variable capture inlet area on the F- 

15 – you can control the thrust level 

potential by controlling the airflow to the 

engine. So if you have a scramjet vehicle, 

and you want to increase the thrust of it, 

you have to increase it’s angle of attack – 

not by much, only by about 2 or 3 degrees. 

Nevertheless, as you advance the throttle, 

the nose comes up, and that’s very 

counterintuitive to a pilot, who will think 

that the nose coming up when you advance 

the throttle means that there’s something 

wrong. 

Hypersonics: Designs for Mach 4.5 & 6 vehicles 

designed by McDonnell-Douglas from ’58 to ’64. 

So in the simulator, these pilots were not pulling up, but they were advancing the throttle. 

Again, in order to get more thrust out of a ram-compression engine you have to increase the 

capture area, and the way that you increase the capture area is to pull the nose up – and since 

the whole bottom of the aircraft is the engine, it increases its capture area. 

AAG: Most people probably weren’t really aware of the rumors about Aurora until Bill 

Sweetman’s Popular Science article about it in 1993. Now in that article, they discussed a “string 

of pearls” UFO reported traveling westerly over northern California, followed moments later by 

the same traveling back over SoCal –which enthusiasts took to be evidence of an external-burn 

engine they thought proved Aurora’s existence. 

Czysz: “Donuts on a chain” is actually the common term – but this stuff goes back a lot 

further than those UFO’s reports that Sweetman was talking about – the aircraft that we were 


involved with go back at least to ’64 or ’65, and I was convinced while I was with the Advanced 

Design Group over at McDonnell in the mid 60’s that we could have built one of these.. It 

wouldn’t have even been a challenge. 

All of this “donuts on a chain stuff” is pretty basic – if you’ve ever watched when Fred Billick 

used to run his scramjets up a John’s Hopkins you’d get a really good visual of what’s going on 

here. There’s no such thing as an absolutely steady shock-compression engine. Little changes in 

the atmosphere and other variables cause the shockwave to move back and forth inside the 

engine, which changes the compression slightly. This causes the exhaust-glow to pulsate – what 

that means to me is that it’s an engine like Fred used to build. There’s no magic to it. 

AAG: Now would a hypersonic aircraft like this be much larger or heavier than a 

conventional fighter interceptor? 

Czysz: Our Mach 6 interceptors weren’t 

built like the X-15 prototype, which used a 

steel-alloy hot-structure that served as a heatsink 

for aerodynamic heat-loads. Ours were 

built with metal thermal protection-systems 

over a lightweight aluminum structure, so 

most of the thermal energy was radiated away 

into space, and for those vehicles we were 

running somewhere around the weight of a 

DC-9. These were neither exceptionally large 

nor heavy vehicles – they were somewhere on 

the order of 60 to 70 feet long. That was for a 

single person combat vehicle – now for a 

multi-crewed, very long-range vehicle, you 

might start looking at something with a size 

and weight comparable to a 747. 

Heat-Proof: A roll-bonded titanium structural 

component used in the McDonnell prototype. 

AAG: Well, wasn’t the larger vehicle design closer to the goals of the National Aerospace 

Plane (NASP) project that you worked on later in the 1980’s, for hypersonic passenger & cargo 

transport? 

Czysz: Well, it’s hard to say what NASP was aimed at. Between about ’76 and ’83, I was 

involved with some special programs at McDonnell. On the last day in July in 1983, I was out 

there on Thursday and I was supposed to leave the next morning to be home for the weekend. 

Anyhow, I got a call from one of the Directors who said, “I happen to be out here for something 

– you’re not going home yet, you’re going to meet me at the Air Force station tomorrow for 

lunch over by the Aerospace Corporation on Sepulveda. Maybe you’ll make it home by Monday 

– we’ll see.” 

So I show up for lunch over at the Air Force station, and Harold Ostroff was sitting down at this 

table with a big group of military & civilian guys in business suits, and as I walked up to the 

table, he turns to the other guys sitting there and says, “I’d like to introduce you all to the new 

head of McDonnell’s Advanced Aerospace Program.” Anyhow, I didn’t know anything about this 

beforehand, and when he said it I looked around a bit for the person he was talking about – and 

after a second I guess that it finally sunk in that he was talking about me. 


So that was how I found out about it – I had 

a deputy program manager from 

Huntington Beach, and there was a group 

there from Aerojet -- Don Kissinger, Mike 

Hamel, and Ron Samborski – that were 

there to talk about the air-turbo ramjet 

work that they’d patented back in 1946. 

I went out to Aerojet the next couple of days 

for briefings on their engine designs, and 

when I came back home, we did a proposal 

for the Air Force TAV program, but the 

main thrust was a proposal that we put 

together with the people from Huntington 

Beach on a 2-stage to orbit vehicle. The first 

stage would fly with air-turbo ramjets to 

about Mach 6 or 7, and then it would stage 

with a scramjet vehicle a rocket that would 

deploy up into orbit. 

We had several different concepts for this, 

depending on how soon we wanted we 

wanted the thing to fly. One of the people 

out at Huntington Beach named Joe Shergi 

had a concept for what he called a “tossback 

booster”, that looked like an Apollo 

capsule with engines mounted in what 

looked like the heat-shield. After you 

separated the upper-stage, this thing would 

turn around and retrofire to toss back to the 

launch site, making everything recoverable. 

We had 2 or 3 concepts that we were 

briefing as 2-stage to orbit vehicles. The first 

one that we could build quickly, based on all 

the hardware that was available, was a 

hypersonic FDL-7C glider on top of a tossback 

booster. Then we went to an air-turbo 

ramjet first stage which went to about Mach 

7 to 8, and later we went to a scramjet first 

stage that went to about Mach 12. 

We hired a guy named Larry Fogel from the 

Titan Corporation, and he actually toured 

all of the SAC bases that had operational B- 

52 squadrons and asked them what they 

would do if they had one of these NASP 

vehicles -- how they use it, maintain it, and 

stuff like that. We built an entire database 

on what the Strategic Air Command 

estimated these vehicles would cost to 

operate. We’d given them all the numbers 

that we had at the outset – how much thrust 

we had, how much propellant we needed, 

NASP and the X-30: The X-30 National 

Aerospace Plane (NASP) was the public follow-on 

to the classified Defense Advanced Research 

Projects Agency (DARPA) Copper Canyon program 

of 1982-1985. 

President Reagan announced the NASP project in 

his 1986 State of the Union message, calling for 

development of "...a new Orient Express that 

could, by the end of the next decade, take off from 

Dulles Airport and accelerate up to twenty-five 

times the speed of sound, attaining low earth orbit 

or flying to Tokyo within two hours...". 

This program to develop an single-stage-to-orbit, 

horizontal takeoff/horizontal landing, air-breathing 

scramjet manned vehicle started at Phase 2 

(Copper Canyon was Phase 1). In this phase the 

essential new materials, structures, and 

manufacturing processes would be validated. 

Phase 3, the actual design, construction and flight 

testing of the aircraft, was to begin in 1990. 

The Department of Defense was to fund $2.65 of 

the $3.33 billion Phase 2 development cost over 

eight years. It was never made quite clear what 

the Defense Department's interest in the project 

was. Many observers believed that it was all an 

elaborate cover for development of one or more 

heavily-classified high-technology vehicles. 

- Mark Wade, Astronautix.Com 


how many times the engines could be re-used, etc – and they gave us back operational cost 

estimates compared to a traditional B-52 squadron. It was quite interesting… 

We took this information and used it for briefings in Washington DC, which is where I met 

Scotty Crossfield, who was working with Dan Glickman – and what we ended up with was the 

first stage vehicle, which was a large, Mach-6 vehicle. This led to the development of a prototype 

that we created as a demonstrator to validate the technology. 

So the prototype was built to show how the NASP vehicle could fulfill 3 primary mission roles. 

The first was simply as a Mach-6 transport for passengers, the second was a Mach-8 strategic 

strike-aircraft for the Air Force, and the third involved combining the vehicle with an upperstage 

rocket to go into Low-Earth Orbit. 

AAG: It sounds like this technology really blurs the line between an aircraft and the Space- 

Shuttle or maybe even a true spacecraft... 

Czysz: Well the shuttle’s not an aircraft – it’s an abortion trying to figure out how to fly. You 

never want to build a vehicle that looks like that. 

The best vehicles ever designed came out of the Air 

Force Flight-Dynamics Lab, and Draper made one 

huge effort to try and get NASA to listen, and they 

absolutely refused to take his advice. 

From the beginning, NASA had their own ideas 

about bluntness and all sorts of crazy design ideas 

that ended up in the Shuttle. The real hypersonic 

vehicles that were inherently stable – from Mach 

22 all the way down to zero, and had thermal 

protection systems already worked out – were 

simply discarded. 

These weren’t new ideas, even when the Shuttle 

was being designed. The Department of Defense 

was involved with this between ’58 and ’68, and 

they were discarded because the President at that 

time decided that no military systems would enter 

orbit. The administration was deathly afraid back 

then of militarizing space, which meant that 

everything going into space had to be civilian, so 

NASA took over everything. 

Goodbye Shuttle: If NASP had been 

completed, it would have replaced Shuttle. 

The Air Force has something called the XLR-129 – it’s in a book that one of the Pratt & Whitney 

guys wrote that you can buy from the Society of Automotive Engineers library. The XLR-129 had 

about 580,000 pounds of thrust from a LOX-hydrogen engine and 3,500 psi chamber pressure. 

It was fired 40 times without any overhaul, and it was brought up to full-power in about 3.5 

months – whereas the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) took about 38 months to come up to 

full-power. 

This very same XLR-129 engine was donated to NASA when the Air Force got out of the spacerace. 

The plans, the engine, and everything related to it were destroyed, and the last sentence in 

that chapter in Pratt’s book says, “NASA destroyed all of this because they didn’t want to 

embarrass their present engine contractor.” 


AAG: Let’s return to Aurora for a bit – given what you’ve said about the later goals of the 

NASP project, do you think that one of Aurora’s mission roles might be some kind of satellitedeployment 

and retrieval system for the Air Force? 

Czysz: No – that’s not possible with Aurora. You can’t build a Mach-6 aircraft that goes to 

orbit. You can build a first-stage to reach Mach-6 and then launch off the top of it to reach orbit 

– that’s the Sanger concept that MBB had. However, Aurora itself is an aircraft, not a spacecraft. 

It’s going to be focused on the primary mission roles that I described earlier, like the naval 

interdiction role that we talked about. 

AAG: Well, given the issues that NASA’s having with the Shuttle Program at the moment, do 

you think that they may someday return to this type of hardware for a next-generation Shuttle 

design? 

Czysz: One of Reagan’s assistant secretaries of commerce – for innovation, technology, and 

productivity-- was named D. Bruce Merrifield, and he was very Russian in his thinking. The 

Russians have prototype factories that take laboratory ideas, and translate them into something 

that can be used in a functional, operational piece of hardware. 

Merrifield’s concept was that the deficiency in the 

United States is that it uses projects to prepare 

technologies for application, which doesn’t give the 

new technologies adequate time to properly 

mature. He always advocated that just like with 

baseball players, technology needs a “farm team” to 

develop it so that it can later be used functionally. 

The Japanese do this, the Russians used to do this, 

and they do it because it produces great results. 

What we were doing when I was at McDonnell- 

Douglas – because “Old-Man Mac” was a hardware 

guy – was looking at how you could take these big 

ideas and build samples & prototypes out of them, 

to see if we could come out of this with an 

operational concept. 

When we designed a Mach-6 aircraft, we didn’t 

follow NASA’s strategy of building a research and 

develop vehicle that could only be flown 3 times a 

year. What we developed were vehicles that were 

operationally functional as much as a B-52 is. 

Wind-Tunnel: Testing of a NASP model in a 

Mach-12+ wind-tunnel at NASA. 

Our resupply vehicle in 1964 for the manned orbiting laboratory had 11 operational vehicles and 

3 spares – and those 11 vehicles flew 100 times a year for 15 years. That’s 1964 industrial 

capability – no magic at all. I don’t need magic. Now compare that to the Shuttle. 

AAG: The amazing thing from my perspective is learning about just how much has already 

been accomplished in this area, and in the area of hypersonics. In 2006 we’re back to 

questioning what we can achieve, and most of the questions are about things that have already 

been achieved – the scope of prior work is just amazing... 


Czysz: Yes, we accomplished a lot. You know, the other problem is that if you get 

organization who’s function is research and development, and you hand them an operational 

vehicle, they don’t want it, because they want to do research and development. 

AAG: Well again, the NASP design is a really beautiful design – it’s really remarkable as 

being an evolution of the lifting body. It’s what the Shuttle could have, and probably should have 

been, right? 

Czysz: The baseline vehicle that was used as the reference vehicle for NASP was the original 

1963 Mach-12 scramjet powered vehicle by McDonnell. I’m putting together some of our older 

materials that you can post on the website – including stuff back to ’58. When you at the old 

Mach-6 aircraft, you’ll look at it and immediately say it’s Aurora, but it’s not – it was called our 

Mach 6 manned hypersonic fighter. 

AAG: One thing I’d wondered about from 

some of the NASP schematics I’ve seen is the 

blunt nose – why is that? 

Czysz: Not blunt – 2 dimensional. It’s got 

a sharp wedge at the nose. Now the original 

hypersonic vehicle for McDonnell-Douglas 

had a pointed nose – it was based on a conicle 

body. It was a lifting body, but it had a 

pointed nose. Back in those days the low-drag 

vehicles were all pointed cones. 

However, if you go into any reference book 

and you look up the wave drag of a pointed 

cone versus a sharp-wedge, the wedge has the 

square root of 3 over 3 of the pointed cone. 

The 2-dimensional wedge at the same angle 

has less drag than the cone does. 

Hypersonic Airflow: A CAD-rendering of the 

NASP vehicle’s hypersonic airflow during flight. 

So Dick Newman over at flight dynamics lab at about ’59 and 60 with Will Hankey, Jack Pike 

over in England, and Bob Kreger who’s a VP over at Boeing now came up with a 2-dimensional 

nose. You look at it from the side and it looks like a point, and you look at it from the top and it 

looks blunt. It’s not a blunt nose, though – it’s a 2-dimensional nose. It’s a wedge. 

The whole idea here is having less drag. You want the least drag you can get – especially for an 

air-breather. You can argue whether it’s a straight across the top or it’s a power-law – we’ve had 

all different kinds depending on whose theory we were operating on. But it’s still a 2- 

dimensional nose. 

AAG: Now in terms of hypersonic aircraft, do you think we’ll ever see something like this 

become a recognized part of our arsenal and a larger component of future air-power? It seems 

like there’s always a need for faster aircraft, and but today’s state of the art seems to be going in 

a different direction… 

Czysz: Well when Scott Crossfield, Gus Wyss, and myself were sitting over at the aerospace 

club in Washington DC, we put together a chart for Sandy McDonnell that talked about the 


demonstator that we were proposing for the Air Force – this came well before Copper Canyon 

ever started. Now at Mach 6, it could carry about 40 people, a Mach 7 capability to carry military 

goods, and it could be used as a demonstrator to show that with the right equipment – a rocket 

boost inside of it plus the air-breathing engine – we could get it to orbital speed. 

Now we weren’t going to take it into orbit – we were going to take it up to nearly orbital speed 

and then glide around back on the other side. So a full-sized version of this would fly at Mach 4.5 

across the Pacific. So we were sitting there talking about what this concept, and that’s when 

Scotty came up with the name “Orient Express”….so that’s where that name originally came 

from. 

If you go back and look at the original B-70 

proposals, one of concepts was proposed was 

to take the fuel out of the fuselage as a 

demonstrator to show that a Mach-3 

transport could carry commercial passengers 

without killing them. If you take the hydrogen 

tank and block it off so you can fly with 

methane instead as an aerodynamic vehicle, 

then you have enough space in the tank for 

about 40 or 50 people. Since the tank was 

built to keep liquid hydrogen cold, keeping 

the people warm to 72 degrees wasn’t even an 

issue. You see, the critics kept telling us, “the 

people are going to burn up”, but that’s not 

true – why would they burn up? They’re 

sitting inside of a tank designed to hold -450 

degree hydrogen. 

Orient Express: Attaining low-earth orbit or flying 

to Tokyo in 2 hours, according to President Reagan 

AAG: So you’re talking about Mach 3 commercial transportation in your vehicle, then? What 

kind of coast to coast flight-times are you going to get with something like that? 

Czysz: No – the B-70 project was Mach 3.2, and ours was Mach 4.5. Same idea, though. The 

Coast to Coast times you’re talking about are too short – it takes you a certain length of time to 

climb and a certain length of time to descend. 

Let’s use an extreme example: let’s say that you’re going to fly at Mach 12. The shortest possible 

distance that makes it possible is about 5,000 miles. For something like Mach 2.5, then 

something like 2,500 miles might be practical. I don’t have the graph any longer, but the idea is 

that for each distance there is a speed that gives you the least time – if you fly faster or slower 

than that, it’s going to take longer. 

AAG: That basically involves climbing, accelerating, and getting to the right altitude, right? 

Czysz: The hard part is slowing down – because if you have air-shocks in the inlet from 

slowing down too fast, you’ll unstart the engine. So it takes you twice as long to slow down as it 

does for you to accelerate. 

AAG: Now in terms of maneuverability for a hypersonic aircraft, is it pretty maneuverable, 

or is the aircraft just flying too fast to maneuver well? 


Czysz: It’s maneuverable – you can pull load-factor with that. With our Mach-6 strike 

reconnaissance craft flying over the GIUK gap, we could pull a 3.5 gee turn with no difficulty. It 

gets harder the faster you go, because the angle of attack increases the temperature, so you have 

to be very careful – but at Mach 6 it’s no problem. 

AAG: The reason I asked is because there was 

speculation in the Popular Science article on 

Aurora that the vehicle was taking the length of the 

entire state of California to turn around. That’s why 

the “UFO” was supposedly heading westerly over 

San Francisco and seen returning over San Diego, if 

I remember correctly… 

Czysz: At Mach 12 maybe, but not Mach 6. If 

you were flying over a spot in the GIUK gap at 

Mach 6, you could do a 150 or 200 mile diameter 

turn – which is perfect for interdiction, because you 

wanted the ship or whatever you were tracking to 

be inside the turn. So as you banked up to do the 

turn, your sensors would be pointing right straight 

down at the ground. 

Interdiction: Flying a pattern at Mach 6 to 

locate potentially hostile naval vessels. 

AAG: Did you guys ever look at deploying weapons out of a hypersonic aircraft? Would there 

be any problems with that? 

Czysz: Naw…they used to bet Kelly Johnson that he could never deploy all kinds of stuff out 

of the YF-12, but he designed his own system and deployed 6-missiles out of the YF-12 with no 

problems at all. I have never met a group of aerospace engineers or aeronautical engineers like 

that group of people. The mold for them is gone - people don’t think like that anymore. They 

were problem solvers. 

They did a lot of pioneering work with beta-titanium, and it’s very hard stuff to work with. When 

Kelly first started making structural components out of this material, out of the first hundred 

forgings that he performed, he had 1 component that worked—the rest were garbage. Three 

months later, out of the 100 parts that he tried, he got 94 out 

that worked. He didn’t bring in outside specialists or 

contractors to solve the problem – it was his own team that 

came up with the solution. When you actually tell people 

some of the experiences they had on the SR-71 Project, in 

today’s environment it would be cancelled. 

Kelly Johnson: Founder of the 

Lockheed Skunkworks division. 

AAG: Those are impressive colleagues – it’s no wonder 

you were getting late-night calls from people standing next to 

“an aircraft you’d recognize”. Did you ever follow up later 

with any of them to see if they’d be more open to discussing 

it now that they’re retired? 

Czysz: No, the ones that I knew who were involved are 

no longer alive, and the ones who are involved today don’t 

talk. 


AAG: Do you think that’s because these 

projects are still ongoing, and anybody who 

knows about them is bound by a secrecy 

agreements? 

Czysz: Well, remember, there’s a whole 

new young generation of engineers designing 

today’s aircraft. If these aircraft exist, it’s like 

the how the B-52 pilots of today are the 

grandsons of the ones who started flying B- 

52’s when they were first introduced – so 

whatever kind of secret aircraft are out there 

now are being designed & flown by an entirely 

new group of people, with new mission roles. 

I don’t know what’s out there, but it could be. 

To say that Aurora is a technical impossibility 

is an incorrect statement – it has been 

technically feasible for the last 35 or 40 years. 

“I’ve had strange calls in the 

evening by people who were 

telling me, "I used to work 

with you, and I’m standing 

next to the aircraft that you'd 

recognize", and then they 

hung up… I think the rumor 

mill is probably right about 

Aurora.” 

Paul Czysz is a Professor Emeritus of Aerospace 

Engineering (retired) at Saint Louis University, 

the former Chief Scientist for the National 

Aerospace Place (NASP) project, and the CEO 

of his hypersonic research company, 

Hypertech Concepts, LLC. For additional 

information on his latest work, contact him 

directly at: paulczysz@sbcglobal.net

Paul-Czysz-Hypersoni.. - American Antigravity

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