An X-51A Waverider flight test vehicle made the longest supersonic combustion ramjet-powered hypersonic flight Wednesday, May 26 off the southern California coast, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base said.

The over-200 second burn by the X-51’s Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne-built air breathing scramjet engine accelerated the vehicle to Mach 6. The previous longest scramjet burn in a flight test was 12 seconds in a NASA X-43.

Air Force officials called the test, the first of four planned, an “unqualified success,” the statement from Wright-Patterson said.

The Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson manages the X-51A program.

The flight is considered the first use of a practical hydrocarbon fueled scramjet in flight.

“We are ecstatic to have accomplished most of our test points on the X-51A’s very first hypersonic mission,” Charlie Brink, X-51A program manager, said in a statement from the base. “We equate this leap in engine technology as equivalent to the post-World War II jump from propeller-driven aircraft to jet engines.”