When Anduril’s YFQ-44A drone flies for the first time, it will do so in a semi-autonomous fashion as part of a broader plan to get the design to an actual operational state as fast as possible. The company says this self-imposed requirement is why the type, one of two currently being developed for the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, has yet to take to the skies. A first flight for the YFQ-44A, also known as Fury, is expected soon, and more of the drones are in production to help steadily expand the future testing regimen.

Diem Salmon, Vice President of Air Dominance and Strike at Anduril, and Jason Levin, the company’s Senior Vice President of Engineering for Air Dominance and Strike shared updates on the state of Fury’s development to TWZ and others today at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2025 Air, Space, and Cyber Conference. Fury’s story traces back to the late 2010s and an aggressor drone concept from a company called Blue Force Technologies, which Anduril acquired in 2023, as you can read about in extensive detail in this past War Zone feature. The Air Force picked Fury, as well as a design from General Atomics now designated the YFQ-42A, to proceed in the first phase, or Increment 1, of the CCA program last year. The YFQ-42A flew for the first time in August.

“We have multiple vehicles at our test facility in ground testing right now, and we’re in the final stages before first flight,” Anduril’s Salmon said. “All in all, we’re still well ahead of the program schedule in terms of getting YFQ-44A into the air. [We] feel really confident in our ability to do so and still feel really good about the program schedule.”

Anduril’s Levin indicated that the plan is for all of the “vehicles ” currently undergoing ground testing to eventually fly, rather than some of them staying non-flying test articles.

Neither Salmon nor Levin would offer a specific timeline for when the YFQ-44A’s first flight is now set to occur. At a separate roundtable on the sidelines of the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink told TWZ and others that the service was hoping to see the drone fly by the middle of October. In a keynote address at the conference earlier today, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin described the testing milestone as “imminent.”

“We also have several vehicles currently in various stages of manufacturing,” Salmon continued. We are “working on multiple tails right now to support the more expansive flight test profile that we’re getting into in the next year.”

Anduril’s Salmon also provided some more specific details on developmental goals for the YFQ-44A around its first flight, especially when it comes to autonomy. Semi-autonomous takeoff and recovery of uncrewed aircraft is not new, with other U.S. and foreign designs, like Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk and General Atomics Reaper, having this capability to varying degrees. Anduril’s position is that it is something of a first for a clean-sheet design to make its initial takeoff, flight, and recovery in this mode.

“The goal for Anduril has always [been] to make this an actual semi-autonomous CCA, and so that’s been the emphasis since day one,” she said. “Taxi has been semi-autonomous, which basically means, we hit a button, it goes to the points that’s been designated by that vehicle, completes a taxi, [and] returns.”

“The goal is to also [to] get to a semi-autonomous first flight, which means takeoff and landing will be done by a push of a button. There is no stick and throttle,” Salmon added. “It will be able to execute the actual first flight profile, pre-planned, using autonomy software on the vehicle.”

Further software development to enable that level of autonomy is currently the main schedule driver when it comes to YFQ-44A’s first flight.

“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, which is getting to a semi-autonomous first light,” Salmon noted.

“So the aircraft’s been moving very fast, from PDR [Preliminary Design Review] last year to getting into ground testing a year later, and then same as the software as well,” Anduril’s Levin added. “So the software’s had to be clean-sheet to get to the semi-autonomous capability. We’re able to leverage a lot of the work you see on other products that are flying similar software, but to get to the level of rigor and complexity needed for CCA has just been a different piece to kind of handle.”

Levin further explained that Anduril is currently developing what he called the “platform autonomy” package for the YFQ-44A, which will handle things like taxing and takeoff and landing, in-house. The company plans to work with other vendors on the “mission autonomy” side, which will enable the drone to perform various tasks once airborne. Anduril’s own Lattice proprietary artificial intelligence-enabled autonomy software package is expected to factor into the mission autonomy equation, as well.

“So it’s really been a parallel effort. Both the hardware team’s working everything from [the] electrical system, avionics, fuel system, and the jet itself, and then, as well as the software in parallel,” he continued. “And then rigging that out through “iron bird,” hardware-in-the-loop, software-in-the-loop, and then all the actual aircraft itself.”

The iron bird is a non-flying test article that Anduril, and Blue Force Technologies before it, have been using for years to support the development of Fury.

“We have very high fidelity simulations where we develop the software, we put it through software-in-the-loop, but then once we put it on the actual hardware, in the integration, there’s always something that maybe didn’t match correctly, and then we have to go back and validate that as we update it,” Levin explained. “There’s not a lot of playbooks on how you go from basically clean sheet to a semi-autonomous capability right off the bat. I don’t know if there’s any aircraft that have really done that. So basically, figuring out how we’re going to do this. We’ve had to kind of create some of the path there.”

TWZ has repeatedly highlighted that the Air Force’s CCA program, as well as parallel efforts ongoing within the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy, still have many questions to answer about how drones in this category will be deployed, launched, recovered, supported, and otherwise operated, as well as utilized during actual tactical operations. Building trust among the human aviators that will be expected to operate with these uncrewed wingmen will also be vital, as you can read more about here.

“For Anduril, since we did not have a ground control station takeoff and landing, we would have to develop that capability,” he also noted when asked to further explain the decision to pursue a semi-autonomous first flight. “And so that would have had to be a new capability to develop. And actually, we thought it would have been a step backwards, because we really want to get to the semi-autonomous thing and bring out that problem.”

“Just to clarify terms, there is gonna be a control element for [our] CCA, where there will be humans on the ground, some kind of oversight of the platforms,” Salmon said. “The distinction here is that they’re not going to be remotely piloted.”

Anduril’s Salmon also said that the company’s focus has been on meeting the Air Force’s aggressive timeline for fielding an actual CCA capability, not just getting YFQ-44A into the air. The current stated goal is for Increment 1 CCAs to be at least starting to enter operational service before the end of the decade. The Air Force has said it is looking to acquire between 100 and 150 Increment 1 CCAs, and hundreds more through further increments. It remains unclear whether the service expects to pick a single winning design in the program’s first phase or pursue production of both the YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A.

“It was not a race to get to first flight as fast as humanly possible. It was, how do we field this really advanced and novel capability as fast as we can,” she said. “And with that comes the recognition that the autonomy is the hard part here, and so that’s the thing that you actually need to burn down from a technical development, testing, and risk perspective. And so that’s how we’ve approached our program.”

Levin pointed out that achieving a semi-autonomous first flight is not a hard Air Force requirement, but also that the service has “very few hard requirements” for the CCA program. He also said that Anduril’s development schedule

Once the YFQ-44A does makes its maiden flight, the initial testing plan is set to include things like checking out the drone’s handling qualities, avionics, and other systems, as well as starting to expand its performance envelope, according to Levin. He would not provide any specific timeline for when Anduril might get to munition testing or more advanced systems integration.

Salmon and Levin were also asked about what plans Anduril might have in regard to the expected follow-on Increment 2 of the Air Force’s CCA program, as well as the Navy’s separate CCA efforts, but declined to provide hard specifics. The Navy just disclosed earlier this month that it had hired Anduril, as well as Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, to work on conceptual carrier-based CCA designs, as you can read more about here. Lockheed Martin has received a separate contract to provide the Navy with an accompanying common command and control architecture.

“The way we would approach other air vehicle development efforts is they would not be Fury derivatives, but instead they would use a lot of the capabilities inside Fury, which might be some of the avionics boxes, maybe some of the software, and then basically the design process and build process we would leverage. But if we were to build a Navy CCA, it would probably look nothing like a Fury … a future CCA that had a different mission, it probably would not be a Fury derivative.”

When pressed on this in light of Anduril’s recently disclosed contract with the Navy, Levin further stressed that any carrier-based design the company might develop would not be a direct Fury derivative.

Levin did say that Anduril is pursuing export sales of Fury variants, including in Europe, as part of a partnership with Rheinmetall in Germany that was announced back in June.

Regardless, “if there’s any autonomous air vehicle program, we’ll compete. If there are any autonomous software program [sic], we will compete on that as well, whether it’s for the Air Force, the Navy, or for whoever, you can imagine that we’re going to compete.”

When it comes to the YFQ-44A, the drone now looks set to fly for the first time within a matter weeks, and in a semi-autonomous mode that Anduril hopes will help put it on a path to being a real operational asset within the next few years.

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