Anduril's YFQ-44A Begins Flight Testing for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program

The history of military aviation is marked by a series of fundamental technological transformations. Each redefines how we think of an aircraft, what it is capable of, and how we employ it in combat.

These developments have stretched over decades. In the 1950s, piston-driven aircraft gave way to jet-powered aircraft, which moved pilots faster, farther, and higher than they had ever been before. In the 1980s, the advances in jet power were multiplied by stealth, transforming our ability to strike targets deep behind enemy lines, undetected.

Today, we stand upon another precipice — a “step change” in the annals of aviation — the integration of autonomy into fighter aircraft.

Our path forward into this new era is led by a critical program and fueled a critical milestone: we recently began flight testing for Anduril’s YFQ-44A Collaborative Combat Aircraft. YFQ-44A is designed to gain and maintain air superiority in highly contested environments through a focus on autonomy and affordable mass — a paradigm shift in how the United States will employ and project combat airpower this decade and beyond.

Flight testing is where we prove to ourselves, to the Air Force, to our allies, and to our adversaries that these proclamations about game-changing technology go beyond words. They’re real, and they are taking to the skies today. The flight testing process is where we prove that our aircraft meets the mark in terms of speed, maneuverability, autonomy, stealth, range, weapons systems integration, and more. As YFQ-44A climbs higher, we’re proving that it doesn’t merely look like a fighter, but that it performs like one.

Flight testing for the CCA program is also about more than simply proving raw fighter performance in a vacuum. The real step change that autonomy is driving is enabling a team of robotic aircraft to collaborate to accomplish mission objectives. We designed YFQ-44A for a specific Air Force mission: to enhance survivability, lethality, and mission effectiveness by teaming with crewed fighter aircraft or operating independently. Through flight testing, Anduril and the Air Force are developing those collaborative, manned-unmanned teaming concepts and tactics that will inform how we integrate, fight with, and sustain truly autonomous aircraft.

This is ambitious. None of these tasks are small. Each of them is as critical as the next. But with every technological revolution in aviation, Americans have always had to aim high. The magnitude of the challenges before us and the realness of the threat demand that we deliver on these goals quickly.

Clean-sheet to flight testing in 556 days
Speed to ramp — or the ability to build significant quantities of aircraft quickly — is paramount for the CCA program. In fact, we don’t have a choice. The threats we face are real. Our adversaries have spent the better part of the last several decades investing in the technologies specifically designed to outmatch us. And those technologies are evolving faster than ever: evolutions once measured in years have pivoted to months, weeks, even days. In the last year alone, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force has teased, introduced, and flown next-generation aircraft at a frantic pace, including at least two high end crewed aircraft and multiple uncrewed platforms.

One thing is clear: our adversaries are not waiting for us. Only by achieving affordable mass, by putting new and more intelligent aircraft on the ramp, can we successfully deter great power conflict.

We’ve fully embraced this challenge. Anduril and the U.S. Air Force began flight testing at record speed, taking the YFQ-44A from clean-sheet design to wheels-up in just 556 days, faster than any major fighter aircraft program in recent history. A historic technology deserves a historic effort to execute it.

Semi-autonomous from first flight
There is no chapter in aviation textbooks about how to develop and test semi-autonomous fighter aircraft. Anduril and the U.S. Air Force, together, are writing it. We’ve been able to move at unprecedented speed thanks to an unwavering collaboration with our Air Force teammates, a relentless commitment to simplicity in design and ease of manufacture, and a devotion to doing the hard things first.

YFQ-44A was not designed to be a remotely-piloted aircraft, and that is not how we are operating it — from first flight and forever onward. All of our taxi and flight tests have been and will continue to be semi-autonomous. This is a new age of air power; there is no operator with a stick and throttle flying the aircraft behind the scenes. Our aircraft is ushering in this new paradigm with incredible technical precision: it executes a mission plan on its own, manages flight control and throttle adjustment independent of human command, and returns to land at the push of a button, all under the watchful eye of an operator “on the loop” but not in it.

It must do more than just fly. CCA are built to win the high end fight; that’s what we’ve built the software that powers YFQ-44A to do. In the air, the fully integrated weapon system processes data at the speed that combat demands. It identifies targets and commands effects, enhancing the lethality, survivability, and effectiveness of the combined team. On the ground, YFQ-44A’s software backbone tracks and manages maintenance, vehicle health, and more, streamlining sustainment to ensure that it’s always ready to fly. In short, YFQ-44A’s autonomy is what makes it more than just a flying machine, but one that’s ready to fight.

The integration of autonomy is not only critical to the CCA program - it is fundamental to achieving the benefits of affordable mass, and is thus determinant to our ability to keep the peace. By integrating autonomy into the earliest ground and flight tests for YFQ-44A, we’re tackling the hardest challenge that this technology presents first. As a result, we are accelerating the pace of learning and iteration so that we can ultimately deliver this decisive capability to warfighters faster.

Towards mass production
The challenges we face are more than just technological. More than ever before, they are also a question of capacity and mass. Increasingly, we simply do not have enough.

To achieve the scale we need at the speed that the threat demands, we are building and testing a new type of production system for YFQ-44A. Through the employment of a common software backbone called ArsenalOS, our production system multiplies the effects of the thousands of design-for-manufacturing decisions made during the development of YFQ-44A. That system is underpinned by a manufacturing philosophy focused on simple, mature, and low-risk production technologies, rather than relying on manufacturing miracles. YFQ-44A will be produced at rate by a broad labor pool, commoditized supply chain, and industry-standard manufacturing processes.

YFQ-44A is streaking through the skies, but its next chapter will be written on the factory floors of America’s heartland. Our investment in this aircraft is the driving force behind Arsenal-1, the 5 million square foot production facility that we’re building in Columbus, Ohio. YFQ-44A will be the first program to move into the factory when its doors open, and we are on track to begin production of prototype CCA at Arsenal-1 in the first half of 2026.

We’re not waiting for Arsenal-1 to start building, though. In the meantime, we have already more than doubled our manufacturing speed for YFQ-44A by rapidly optimizing our processes and workflows, and by making hundreds of tweaks to the design of the aircraft to further enhance producibility. That trend will continue as we prepare to move production into Arsenal-1 early next year.

Expertise and willpower
Making it this far has required herculean investments from the combined Anduril-USAF team measured in time and money. But even more so, our measure of our success has been in the emotion — the blood, sweat, and tears — that made this airframe leave the ground. One of our team members said it best:

“Airplanes are an emotional experience. It’s more than engineering or manufacturing. Aviation writ-large, going all the way back to Orville and Wilbur, is emotional. And we’ve felt that through this project.”

We know that our work is far from over and that the challenges that lie before us are great. That is where we shine. We’ve run into the same sentiment at every stage of the program: “we don’t think that you can do this,” “you won’t make it to the next phase,” “I just don’t see it.” And at every stage, our team has slowly beaten that back through a potent blend of expertise and sheer willpower.

That is the legacy that we bring forward into flight testing. That is how we will tackle the monumental challenges that lie before us. That is how we — Anduril and the United States Air Force — will write the first pages of a new chapter in the history of aviation.