• Ramjets predated World War II, with beginnings in 1913, when René Lorin of France recognised the possibility of using ram pressure in a propulsive device.
• Albert Forno of Hungary was issued a German patent in 1928 on a propulsive device that contained all the elements of a modern ramjet.
• 1935 — René Leduc of France was issued a patent on a piloted aircraft propelled ramjet of his own design. The project was suspended during WWII and on April 21, 1949 a Leduc experimental aircraft made its first powered flight.
• 1953 the Nord-Aviation company of France embarked on a project inspired by the ramjet work of Leduc an aimed at realizing a practical aeroplane that could fly at speeds of Mach numbers in excess of 2. The resulting aeroplane was the Griffon II, a combination turboramjet engine, which established a world speed record of 1640km/h on February 24, 1959.
• From the mid 50s to the late 60s, a variety of experimental scramjets engines were built and ground tested in the U.S. and England. The X-15 rocket research plane flew from the late 1950s into the 1960s, reaching a top speed of Mach 6.7, but never flight tested an operational ramjet.
• In the late 1980s and early 1990s the U.S. launched a major effort ($2 billion) to build a scramjet powered vehicle to fly into orbit around the earth (the NASP program). The program was abandoned in 1993 when it was realised it would cost $15 billion to complete, and there were still a number of unresolved technical difficulties.
• In Australia, the first scramjet experiments were started under the leadership of Australia’s first professor of space engineering, Professor Ray Stalker. The first experiments were held in 1981 by Professor Stalker and Professor Richard Morgan, of UQ’s Centre for Hypersonics, in the T3 ground test facility at ANU which Professor Stalker developed in 1968 before moving to Queensland
• 1987 — The T4 ground test facility was commissioned at The University of Queensland with a primary mission of studying scramjets. It was the first facility in the world capable of both simulating the range of flight speeds required for scramjet development and for measuring the performance characteristics of this type of engine. Initial experiments conducted by the UQ group were commissioned by NASA Langley Research Centre to give direction to aspects of the National Aerospace Plane (NASP) program.
• 1993 —It was reported in the open literature for the first time in the world that a scramjet had achieved more thrust than drag — the essence of flight — in the T4 facility at UQ. Dr Allan Paull, Professor Stalker, and Dr David Mee “flew” a complete scramjet prototype in the T4 shock facility.
• The UQ research group has progressed in the past 17 years from simple generic models to sophisticated models involving the complete flow path. Specialised instrumentation has also been developed for the facility, and in particular for scramjet experiments. This includes measurement devices such as force balances, a mass spectrometer, skin friction gauges, and data recording systems.
• June 2, 2001 — NASA aborts the first test flight of a hypersonic jet, the X-43A prototype in the Hyper-X program over the Pacific Ocean when the Pegasus rocket, which was intended to launch the X-43 jet, careered off course.
• September 4, 2001, The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the first successful ground test flight of a hypersonic scramjet projectile using an enclosed gun barrel facility at Arnold Engineering Development Centre at AEDC,Tennessee in the U.S.
• October 30, 2001 —a UQ-led international consortium including Dr Allan Paull, Dr Hans Alesi, Dr Susan Anderson, and Myles Frost attempted the HyShot experiment at Woomera Australia with assistance from the Royal Australian Air Force’s Aircraft Research and Development Unit (ARDU). The project used a scramjet engine fitted on Terrior Orion rockets. However, a flight anomaly caused by a failure of the rocket fins meant the experiment could not proceed.
•July 30, 2002 — second HyShot scramjet test scheduled for Woomera. HyShot will correlate scramjet experimental results obtained from a ground test facility with flight data for the first time. If the project works, the UQ scramjet will be the fastest air-breathing engine ever built. It is estimated to fly at about Mach 7.6 or 2.4km/sec, or 8600km/hour.
