Program Well Ahead Of Schedule

According to U.S. Air Force Secretary Troy Meinck, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) made by Anduril Industries “should fly [in the] middle of October,” but provided no other details about ongoing testing of the drone.

Anduril’s YFQ-44A is waiting on final refinements of its software before first flight.

Diem Salmon is Vice President for Air Dominance and Strike for Anduril. During a Monday briefing at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space and Cyber conference she said, “The goal is to also get to a semi-autonomous first flight, which means takeoff and landing will be done via push of a button. There is no stick and throttle. It will be able to execute the actual first flight profile pre-planned, using autonomy software on the vehicle.”

Although the first flight of the YFQ-44A missed its summer target, Salmon said the company is still “well ahead of the program schedule” for the milestone.

She said, “There’s just a little bit more on the software development side that needs to get wrung out. So that’s what’s currently driving our schedule right now. But again, I think that’s going to allow us to kind of leapfrog the overall test plan, because we are kind of tackling that hard part first.”

Both Anduril and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems are building autonomous drone prototypes for the first increment of the CCA competition. And both had set summer 2025 for their first flights. General Atomics’ YFQ-42A became the first to fly in July and raised questions about the timing for Anduril’s inaugural flight.

FMI:  www.anduril.com/