Rockwell HiMAT
experimental American aircraft design
The Rockwell RPRV-870 HiMAT (Highly Maneuverable Aircraft Technology) is an experimental remotely piloted aircraft that was produced for a NASA program to develop technologies for future fighter aircraft. Among the technologies explored were close-coupled canards, fully digital flight control (including propulsion), composite materials (graphite and fiberglass), remote piloting, synthetic vision systems, winglets, and others.
Two aircraft were produced by Rockwell International. Their first flights took place in 1979, and testing was completed in 1983. The aircraft was flown 26 times.
Design and development
The HiMATs were remotely piloted, as the design team decided that it would be cheaper and safer to not risk a pilot's life during the experiments. This also meant that no ejection seat would have to be fitted. The aircraft was flown by a pilot in a remote cockpit, and control signals up-linked from the flight controls in the remote cockpit on the ground to the aircraft, and aircraft telemetry downlinked to the remote cockpit displays. The remote cockpit could be configured with either nose camera video or with a 3D synthetic vision display called a "visual display".
The aircraft were launched from a B-52 Stratofortress at altitude.
“Rockwell HiMAT” enters the record as experimental American aircraft design. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rockwell, HiMAT and experimental can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7355671. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1979 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rockwell HiMAT” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.