Experimental aircraft

Experimental aircraft are used for flight research of the most important scientific and technical problems that open up new directions in the development of aviation, testing new scientific and technical solutions, testing and fine—tuning of individual systems and elements of the aircraft.

The need to create it is caused not only by the inability in some cases to simulate in ground-based experimental installations the entire range of external operating conditions of an aircraft and the entire complex of factors affecting it, but also due to strict requirements to ensure a high degree of reliability of aviation equipment and the high technical and financial risk of introducing potentially promising innovations into practice without their preliminary & comprehensive checks in real-world operating conditions.

These are usually specially built aircraft and experimental modifications of serial aircraft (a flying laboratory or a Flying model).

In addition, it is also possible to include those experimental aircraft that, for some reason, were not brought to the stage of mass production, but were used to accumulate experimental data.

Due to their strange designs and characteristics uncharacteristic of widely known flying objects, they can be mistaken for UFOs.