Flight of Hermeus’ Mk 2.1 unmanned jet in May 2026. The aircraft achieved supersonic speeds. (Photo: Hermeus)
Less than three months after the first flight of the Quarterhorse Mk 2.1 unmanned aircraft, Hermeus on Tuesday said the jet-powered aircraft achieved supersonic speeds in its second flight, a first in aviation history.
The F-16-scale Mk 2.1 remotely piloted aircraft was powered by an RTX Pratt & Whitney F100 engine. The aircraft reached a top speed of Mach 1.21, which is nearly 930 miles per hour.
The Mk 2.1 will continue flight testing while Hermeus continues building and testing its next aircraft, the Quarterhorse Mk 2.2, which will be followed by the Mk 2.3. The Los Angeles-based company will push the performance envelope further with new capabilities on each aircraft on the way to “sustained high-Mach flight,” it said.
“Our customers at the Department of War are paying close attention to how fast his program is moving,” AJ Piplica, Hermeus’ co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “This flight demonstrates a pace of execution that is extremely rare in modern aviation.”
The second flight of the Mk 2.1 occurred 364 days after the first flight of company’s first unmanned aircraft, the Mk 1. The Mk 2.1 is nearly three times larger than the Mk 1.
Hermeus is eyeing hypersonic flight speeds.
“Faster unmanned aircraft have the potential to shorten response times and bring affordable mass to the most challenging contested environments,” Hermeus said.
The flight testing is occurring at Spaceport America over White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
A version of this story originally appeared in sister publication Defense Daily.
: