ROBNEWS
Shield AI and GE Aerospace ground tested a steerable exhaust nozzle, last flown on an F 16 in the 1990s, that the proposed aircraft needs to take off and land without a runway.
A thrust-vectoring nozzle that flew 95 times on an F-16 in the 1990s, logging 135 flight hours and 73 hours of ground testing, has been pulled out of storage, refurbished, and run as a single integrated system for the first time in roughly thirty years. It is now the nozzle on Shield AI's proposed runway-free military aircraft, X-BAT, after a ground test at GE Aerospace's Peebles, Ohio facility, announced July 20.
Thrust vectoring, for a reader outside the flight-test community, means a steerable engine exhaust. Instead of firing straight back, the nozzle tilts, which lets an aircraft control its pointing direction in the air and, in vertical-takeoff designs, hold itself steady during a hover. X-BAT's whole pitch to the U.S. military is that it can take off and land without a runway or an airbase. The nozzle makes that possible.
The hardware being reactivated is the Axisymmetric Vectoring Exhaust Nozzle, or AVEN. It was originally built for a multi-axis thrust vectoring program that flew on an F-16 in the 1990s. Shield AI and GE Aerospace say the July 20 campaign was the first fully integrated test of its kind since then, meaning the AVEN hardware, its controls, and the underlying engine were run together in coordinated nozzle movement sequences rather than as separate bench tests. The engine is a modified F110-GE-129E, a fighter-class powerplant in GE's F110 family.
The two companies are reusing proven hardware rather than starting from scratch. X-BAT's open propulsion question is whether 1990s hardware, refurbished and mated to a modern F110, can drive a vertical-takeoff airframe through hover, transition, and forward flight. Those 135 flight hours of AVEN heritage are what the program is leaning on.
The two companies didn't, however, fly anything. The July 20 test was a ground light-off at GE's Peebles, Ohio test operations, the same site that has supported F110 engine work for decades. The X-BAT airframe itself hasn't yet flown publicly, and Shield AI hasn't given a date for first hover or first vertical takeoff. Armor Harris, Shield AI's SVP of aircraft engineering, credited fast AVEN gimballing for attitude control as the key enabler for X-BAT's vertical flight profile. GE Aerospace called the result a "full-circle moment" for a team that worked the original F110 and AVEN integration in the 1990s.
The 1990s F-16 AVEN program accumulated 73 hours of ground testing and 135 flight hours across 95 flights, and the refurbished nozzle inherits that flight record. 1990s heritage shows the AVEN can fly on an F-16. It doesn't show that the refurbished AVEN, mated to an F110-GE-129E and a new airframe, can sustain a vertical-takeoff combat aircraft in production conditions.
A single ground light-off doesn't retire that uncertainty. It does show that the pieces run together, which is the precondition for any future hover test. The next milestone to watch is whether Shield AI moves the integrated engine and AVEN into a ground-based X-BAT prototype for a tethered or untethered hover, and on what timeline.