WhiteKnightTwo (finally) flies

After weeks, if not months, of anticipation, WhiteKnightTwo made its first flight Sunday morning. According to a SPACE.com report, the aircraft took off from Mojave Air and Space Port at 8:17 am PST (11:17 am PST, 1617 GMT) and landed back at the airport exactly one hour later. Flight International has video of a portion of the flight, when WK2 appears to make a low, slow flyby over the airport:

The flight had been expected for quite some time. When WK2 was rolled out in late July at Mojave, flight tests were said to begin by this fall. By late October, with the aircraft still on the ground, word came that the first flight would happen in two to three weeks. By early December, the flight was planned for later this month; Friday the 19th was one date passed around in recent days, and the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) went so far as to issue a press release titled “ISPCS Congratulates Historic WhiteKnightTwo First Flight” even though high winds kept it and other aircraft on the ground that day.

Now that this first flight is out of the way, we can look forward to many more appearances of WK2 in the skies above Mojave—while anticipating, of course, when we might first see SpaceShipTwo…

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