AEVEX has secured a contract valued at up to $92.2 million to support the Pentagon’s efforts to accelerate and modernize hypersonic flight testing under the SkyRange program.
Under the three-year contract, AEVEX is tasked with providing airborne range integration and engineering services, airborne telemetry relay, resilient communications architecture support, and flight operations support across the Western US and Pacific test corridors.
The California company, known for providing autonomous defense capabilities in the US military, is also expected to carry out payload and mission systems integration, as well as distributed range networking, instrumentation, and mission data support.
These are intended to enable increased hypersonic test frequency, enhance data resiliency, and expand the distributed test infrastructure needed to support national defense customers.
“Rapid hypersonic development depends on scalable airborne infrastructure, resilient telemetry architecture, and the ability to collect operational test data at speed,” said Mike Jackson, AEVEX Senior VP of Global Solutions.
SkyRange Program
Traditional hypersonic testing relied heavily on slow, expensive, and stationary ship-based or fixed land assets to track missiles and collect telemetry data. This limited test locations, scheduling flexibility, and overall testing frequency.
The SkyRange initiative, managed by the Pentagon’s Test Resource Management Center, aims to address those limitations by replacing such assets with high-altitude airborne platforms — including former RQ-4 Global Hawks — that can collect, relay, and distribute real-time telemetry data.
Earlier this year, the US Army awarded Northrop Grumman a contract to develop the RangeHawk drone prototype, a modified RQ-4, to enable the rapid integration of different mission systems in support of hypersonic flight testing.
