Hermeus flies its first aircraft out of Mojave, targets supersonic flight next

Summary

Hermeus has completed the first flight of its Mk. 1 aircraft out of Mojave, operated near Edwards Air Force Base — a milestone the company's co-founders AJ and Zach describe as crossing from research project to functioning airplane company.

The Mk. 1 is a roughly 10,000-lb unmanned aircraft, comparable in scale to a fighter trainer. The design was deliberately compromised for high-speed flight: short, stubby wings with high wing loading and low thrust-to-weight mean it handles poorly at subsonic speeds and requires takeoff speeds above 200 mph before it leaves the ground. That difficulty is intentional — Hermeus is building toward hypersonic flight, not a conventional aircraft.

Next step: supersonic

The supersonic demonstrator is F-16 class, roughly 30,000 lbs, and will be powered by the Pratt & Whitney F100 engine. After breaking the sound barrier, the roadmap targets Mach 2.5 to Mach 3 — the speed range at which a turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) engine transitions to ramjet operation. That TBCC engine, where rotating vanes flip to switch between turbine and ramjet modes, remains the long-term propulsion architecture.

The defense pitch

Zach frames the commercial case around cost-per-effect rather than raw speed. The SpaceX analogy is deliberate — the Hermeus team is largely ex-SpaceX. Just as Falcon 9's reusable booster cuts cost per kilogram to orbit by recovering the expensive component, Hermeus argues a hypersonic carrier aircraft removes the booster burden from the weapon itself. A manned or unmanned platform that accelerates a munition from high altitude at high speed lets the weapon fly further, from safer standoff ranges, at orders-of-magnitude lower cost per shot.

The Ukraine-Russia conflict is instructive but limited as a reference case, Zach argues, because the two countries share a border. A Taiwan scenario puts U.S. forces 5,000 miles away, engaging a target 100 miles offshore from China. Low-cost attritable drones work at short ranges; they don't solve the problem of projecting firepower from the second or third island chain or the U.S. west coast. The pitch is low-cost, long-range, and fast — and Hermeus says no one else is working on the problem this way.

Regulatory and testing friction

Regulation is a real constraint but not the primary bottleneck. Hermeus says it is moving fast enough to regularly hit regulatory corner cases that existing rules simply didn't anticipate. The approach is to resolve them quickly and set precedent rather than wait for frameworks to catch up. One active issue is jurisdiction over uncrewed aircraft beyond 12 nautical miles offshore — currently a regulatory gray zone the company needs to resolve before it can conduct over-water testing.

Testing over land is strongly preferred because a crashed aircraft on land yields salvageable data; one that sinks to the ocean floor does not. Hermeus has explored options including Australia's Woomera Range and Pacific locations such as Kwajalein Atoll, but the preference is to stay overland wherever possible.

Company footprint

Hermeus is headquartered in Atlanta, with a growing advanced development and prototyping presence in Los Angeles, an engine test facility in Jacksonville, and a business development and regulatory team in Washington, D.C.