Scaled Composites, LLC

Microlight will always hold a special place in Scaled’s history our very first first-flight: a January 1983 flight for this little canard kicked off our still-held average of one first flight of a new aircraft per year! #firstflightfridays #microlight #history #aviation #airplane

Happy New Year’s Eve! Looking back at 2024, Scaled had a fantastic year full of exciting projects, hands-on manufacturing, and flight test with our fleet of experimental aircraft. Here’s one of the highlights of our year, the M437 Vanguard first flight!   #NewYearsEve #firstflights #celebrate

The first-first flight of ATTT with its original configuration of a cruciform tail was on December 29, 1987! Scaled would later reconfigure this aircraft to a Bronco tail as envelope expansion flights noted deficiencies in the aft loading and aerodynamic qualities.  #firstflightfridays #flighttest

Happy Holidays from Scaled Composites!

Happy Winter Solstice! If you are looking for a festive craft with some airplane flair, here are patterns for Scaled Airplane Paper Snowflakes. #papersnowflake #craft #kidscraft #wintercrafts #decoration

You may have noticed red shirts in a lot of our first flight photos – this good luck tradition started during the SpaceShipOne program when all the teams wore specific color shirts and a comment was made by the White Knight team “we now have to wear red shirts before each flight for luck.” This spread into other teams over the years, and nowadays red shirts are worn for good luck on flight days!   #RedShirts #ButNotLikeStarTrek #goodluckcharm #FirstFlightFridays

Want to be a part of designing, building, and testing the next unique, new aircraft? Scaled Composites is hiring diverse talent to take part in innovative aerospace – apply today! www.scaled.com/careers #business #flighttest #testpilot #engineer #mechanic #informationtechnology

SpaceShipOne celebrated the centennial of the Wright Brothers’ first flight in style in 2003 with the first powered flight of the little soon-to-be spaceship on December 17th! During flight 11P, Pete Siebold and Cory Bird flew WhiteKnight to 47,900 feet and released SpaceShipOne with Brian Binnie aboard as pilot. The rocket motor burn took SpaceShipOne up to an apogee of 67,800 feet where SpaceShipOne deployed its feather to descend and return to glide configuration by 35,000 feet. While the landing was a little rough with a gear collapse, this flight was key in proving out SpaceShipOne’s flight profile on its path to space. #FirstFlightFridays #spaceflight #SpaceShipOne

On December 16, 2017, Scaled took the Stratolaunch “Roc” aircraft out for a very important milestone: its first taxi test. While this particular test didn’t reach any great speeds, moving this behemoth underneath its own power for the first time demonstrated the fundamental ability to control the aircraft speed and direction on the runway – vital first steps of a ground test campaign building up to a first flight!   #FirstFlightFridays #Roc #Stratolaunch #taxitest #testearlytestoften #groundtest

The VisionAire Vantage, a single-engine light business jet prototype, made its first flight on November 16, 1996!   #FirstFlightFridays #BusinessJet #prototype