On Dec. 22, 1966, the HL-10 Lifting Body took its first flight.
The HL-10 was a heavy-lifting, horizontal landing plane built by the Northrop Corporation. The "HL" in its name stands for "heavy lifting," and the "10" indicates that this was the tenth design in the series. The $1.8 million aircraft was delivered to NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia in January of 1966.
Nearly a year later, Bruce Peterson piloted the plane for its inaugural flight. He took it for an unpowered glide test flight over Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
NASA research pilot Bill Dana watches NASA's NB-52B overhead after a flight in the HL-10 lifting body. The HL-10 was one of five lifting body designs flown at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California, from 1966-1975 to study maneuvering and landing a low lift-over-drag vehicle designed for reentry from space. (Image credit: NASA)
Unfortunately, the HL-10 had serious control problems. But Peterson was able to land it safely. Engineers later figured out that the problem could be solved by changing the shape of the fins. The second HL-10 flight didn't take off until 1968, but the HL-10 was much easier to pilot after its design was tweaked.
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Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.
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