Non-Defence Trials

ALFLEX Landing Trials

The Japanese Automatic Landing Flight Experiment (ALFLEX) entailed the testing at Woomera Airfield of a one third scale model of the HOPE spaceplane by the National Aerospace Laboratory (NAL) and the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA). The objective was to test the automatic landing technology to be used for HOPE. Selection of Woomera for the ALFLEX program followed a survey by NAL/NASDA of over 100 prospective sites in Japan and overseas.

Instrumentation installed at Woomera Airfield included a microwave landing system, tracking radar, laser tracker, pseudolite DGPS station, weather station and telemetry, command, display and communications equipment. The trials involved the release of the unmanned ALFLEX vehicle from beneath a Japanese twin-rotor helicopter at an altitude of 1500 metres and distance of 3 km from the runway threshold. Following release, the vehicle glided at a descent angle of 30 degrees, guided by on-board navigation and control equipment and by the ground-based microwave landing system.

Thirteen automatic landing trials were conducted by NAL/NASDA during 1996 over a range of experimental conditions involving release position, wind direction and programmed in-flight manoeuvres. All trials were spectacularly successful. Refer to images and video at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) website (NAL and NASDA were merged into JAXA in October 2003).