DARPA's X 65 demonstrator has no flaps, no ailerons, and no rudder. Instead, 14 small nozzles on its surfaces fire precisely timed jets of air to steer the aircraft. First flight, now eyed before the end of 2026, will finally test that bet.
The triangular wings of DARPA's X-65 drone have arrived at Aurora Flight Sciences' Virginia assembly facility and are now being mated to the fuselage. Aurora, a Boeing subsidiary, posted the milestone on June 23, and New Atlas reports that first flight is now targeted before the end of 2026, after the original summer 2025 schedule slipped on cost overruns, technical hurdles, and supply-chain disruption.
The reason the X-65 matters is what is missing from it. The aircraft, built under DARPA's Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program, has no ailerons, no rudder, and no flaps. Instead, 14 small nozzles distributed across its surfaces fire precisely timed jets of high-pressure air to manipulate the thin layer of fluid that clings to a wing in flight. Engineers call that layer the boundary layer. Push it the right way at the right moment, and the aircraft turns, climbs, or pitches without a single hinged panel moving.
That technique is called Active Flow Control (AFC), and it is the entire bet behind CRANE. DARPA's pitch is that every other system on aircraft has been transformed by software and electronics in recent decades, while primary flight controls have stayed mechanical. AFC is meant to change that, replacing a century of hinges, hydraulics, and cables with software-driven jets. In theory, that means lighter, cheaper, and far more reconfigurable aircraft, with outer wing panels and AFC nozzles that can be swapped between flights to test new layouts.
The X-65 is the physical instantiation of that bet. Its joined-wing layout, two pairs of wings fused at the tips to form a triangular silhouette on each side, gives the AFC nozzles more surface area to work with and trims drag, but it also makes conventional control surfaces harder to fit. Per Aurora's spec sheet, the demonstrator will have a 9.1 m wingspan, a gross weight of around 3,175 kg, and a top speed above 800 km/h, roughly Mach 0.7. Aurora began building the full-scale aircraft in early 2024 and was awarded Phase 2 of CRANE in 2023.
The experiment has a built-in honesty check. The X-65's early flights will still carry conventional mechanical control surfaces as a backup, an arrangement that Richard Wlezien, a former CRANE program manager, has described as "training wheels" for the AFC system. Those mechanical surfaces are meant to be progressively locked out as AFC proves itself. If the training wheels are never turned off, that is the moment the bet fails: AFC could not replace flaps and ailerons across the aircraft's full flight envelope.
That uncertainty is the part most coverage of AFC milestones tends to skip. CRANE has not yet published third-party flight-test analysis, not from NASA, the Air Force Research Laboratory, or a peer-reviewed campaign, and the only flight data so far comes from small-scale demonstrators and ground-test work documented at AIAA SciTech 2023. The 2026 first-flight target is a DARPA and Aurora projection, not a confirmed date, and the 2025 slip is part of a longer pattern of adjustment on a program that began with a Phase 1 award years earlier.
What to watch next: whether the aircraft actually leaves the ground before the end of 2026, how many of the 14 AFC nozzles are active during each test point, and, the durable question, whether the mechanical backup surfaces ever get locked out for good.