DARPA X-Plane Designed To Maneuver With Just Bursts Of Air Finally Gets Its Wings

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DARPA X-Plane Designed To Maneuver With Just Bursts Of Air Finally Gets Its Wings

Aurora Flight Sciences and DARPA hope to see the X-65 drone fly next year after suffering delays and cost growth.

By Joseph Trevithick

Published

Jun 23, 2026 2:00 PM EDT

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Aurora Flight Sciences is now putting the wings on the X-65 experimental drone. This is an important step forward for the X-65, which is designed to maneuver with bursts of air rather than traditional control surfaces. This is technology that could have significant implications for future military and civilian aircraft developments, especially when it comes to stealthy designs.

The X-65 is being developed under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program, which kicked off back in 2020. DARPA subsequently chose Aurora Flight Sciences, a subsidiary of Boeing, to proceed alone with the development of its design. Aurora moved into the latest phase of the program in 2024 and is now targeting a first flight next year. CRANE has suffered several delays and cost growth over the years, which we will come back to later on.

A rendering of the X-65. Aurora Flight Sciences

"The wings have arrived — the next big milestone for X‑65!" Aurora Flight Sciences wrote in a post on its official account on X today. "Built at our WV [West Virginia] facility, the triangular wings enable active flow control testing across multiple sweeps. Integration is underway in VA as we push toward first flight for the @DARPA CRANE program."

A look at one of the wing sections for the X-65. Aurora Flight Sciences

In November 2025, Aurora had also announced progress in construction of the central fuselage. The company has also done wind tunnel testing of subscale models, as well as digital modeling in past phases of CRANE.

The X-65 has a so-called Co-Planar Joined Wing (CJW) planform that includes two sets of wings attached that merge together at the tips, creating the triangular shape on either side. They also have small extensions that extend from those tips, giving the drone a 30-foot wingspan. The design also has a twin vertical tail arrangement.

There is a chin air intake under the forward fuselage, as well as a single exhaust. Renderings have shown that the design will have on t op of the forward end of the fuselage. At the time of writing, neither Aurora nor DAPRA appear to have disclosed details about the drone’s main propulsion arrangement. The X-65 is said to have a gross weight of approximately 7,000 pounds.

This wind tunnel model offers a good general sense of X-65’s planform. Aurora Flight Sciences

As noted, the most intrigueing aspect of the X-65 is the banks of active flow control (AFC) "effectors" that use bursts of highly pressurized air to roll, pitch, and yaw. Traditionally, fixed-wing aircraft use a mixture of flaps, rudders, and other surfaces that physically move to maneuver in flight.

"The AFC system supplies pressurized air to fourteen AFC effectors embedded across all flying surfaces," according to a press release Aurora put out last year. "The triangular wing design enables testing across multiple wing sweeps and is modular with replaceable outboard wings and swappable AFC effectors to allow for future testing of additional AFC designs."

"The X-65 will be built with two sets of control actuators – traditional flaps and rudders as well as AFC effectors embedded across all the lifting surfaces," a 2024 press release from DARPA also notes. "This will both minimize risk and maximize the program’s insight into control effectiveness. The plane’s performance with traditional control surfaces will serve as a baseline; successive tests will selectively lock down moving surfaces, using AFC effectors instead."

This rendering of the X-65 highlights the banks of AFCs, in light gray, along the edges of the wings. DARPA

“The X-65 conventional surfaces are like training wheels to help us understand how AFC can be used in place of traditional flaps and...