A sleek black aircraft emerged from a hangar at Long Beach Airport on Thursday night and was identified as Aevum Aerospace’s Ravn X, a space-launch drone that had not been seen there before. For Ricky Schol, who has spent 16 years photographing aircraft at the airport, it was unlike anything he had ever seen.
Schol said he first thought the aircraft was an F-117 Nighthawk as he drove past, then doubled back after spotting a bright light from a hangar he had not seen open in a long time. He said he pulled over about 100 feet away, jumped out and started taking pictures immediately, convinced he was looking at something extraordinary even before he knew what it was.
The identification matters because the aircraft bore the FAA N Number N567RX and Aevum had reserved that number to an address at the airport, tying the sighting to the Huntsville, Alabama, company. Jay Skylus had described the Ravn X as the company’s mothership for a two-stage rocket system designed to carry a payload of just over 1,000 pounds, with the drone serving as the first stage. The aircraft has been described as twin-engine, 80 feet long, with a 60-foot wingspan and a weight of 55,000 pounds.
That is also where the picture gets murkier. A mockup of the drone was introduced online in 2021, and Gunter’s Space Page said Aevum rolled out a mock-up of the Ravn-X carrier plane in December 2020, with no further activities noticed so far. The airframe seen at Long Beach Airport was identified as the RAVN X, but the visible machine also appears to be a mockup, leaving open whether Aevum was showing a flying prototype or a display model.
Aevum had planned to begin vehicle-level testing to obtain airworthiness certification and launch licensing, a process Skylus said should take 18 months, and it also planned to secure airworthiness certification for the first-stage drone from the FAA. It had said orbital launch tests from Cecil Spaceport in Jacksonville, Florida, would begin by late 2021. What Schol saw on Thursday night shows the program has remained under enough wraps that a veteran airport photographer could still mistake it for a stealth fighter at first glance.
