and range. In 1991 under US Air Force contract, the ARES 25 mm cannon was installed and during testing the cannon performed well but the ARES remains a private project. After an appearance in the movie Aces: Iron Eagle III as a fictional Me 263 fighter, the aircraft has become a commercially available research test bed. The aircraft was stored in December 2000 at the Mojave Spaceport until Scaled Composites became a Northrop Grumman subsidiary and flown again on March 7, 2008. Design The ARES is of canard configuration to enable safer flight at low altitude. The foreplane provides pitch control and is designed so that it reaches critical angle of attack sooner than the main wings, protecting the aircraft from stall while full roll control is retained. The foreplane has a wingspan of 19.2 feet (5.85 m) and is unusual in being swept 7 degrees forward from its attachment point behind the cockpit. The main wing has a span of 35 feet (10.7 m) and a reference area of , not including the strakes. It is swept aft 16 degrees at the leading edge. The strakes are swept 49 degrees at the leading edge. These strakes, combined with a wet wing center-section area, form the bulk of the 2,200 lb (1000 kg, approximately ) fuel capacity. The wing has conventional ailerons on the outboard trailing edge, and spoil-flaps (similar to the dive-brake flap) on the inboard trailing edges. The ailerons are actuated by push-rods, and the spoil-flaps are hydraulically operated. Directional stability is provided by twin boom-mounted fins, each of . area. Each has a cable-actuated rudder at its trailing edge. The rudder actuation system also drives the full-time mechanical nosewheel steering for ground operations. The engine inlet is another major unique feature of ARES. Since gun gas ingestion posed significant problems in other aircraft development programs (like A-10), the configuration of ARES was designed to avoid this problem: the engine inlet is entirely contained on the left side of the aircraft, and the gun is installed on the right side. The inlet has a circular cross section, and is straight into the fan face. The engine is mounted slightly transversely in the fuselage, with an 8-degree misalignment from the aircraft's longitudinal axis. The engine exhaust is turned back to the longitudinal axis by a curved composite tailpipe. A composite tailpipe was to help get the gun recoil reaction