https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned...-us-air-force/
Here are the two companies creating drone wingmen for the US Air Force
The U.S. Air Force on Wednesday announced it selected Anduril and General Atomics to keep designing, building and testing its first batch of
drone wingmen known as collaborative combat aircraft.
The decision on contract option awards marks the service’s most significant step yet as it aims to create a
series of drones using autonomous software to fly alongside piloted fighters, such as the F-35 and Next Generation Air Dominance system.
The Air Force has made the CCA program one of its key efforts to
modernize its fleet with advanced capabilities. The service wants CCAs to be less expensive than piloted aircraft, but still able to carry out airstrikes, conduct reconnaissance or perform electronic warfare operations in combat, thus expanding the reach of crewed planes.
Anduril and General Atomics will now further develop detailed designs of their CCA concepts and build production-representative test aircraft for the Air Force. The service expects to follow this first increment of CCAs with a second wave of more advanced aircraft.
The service could field at least 1,000 CCAs, and the fleet is likely to include multiple types of drone wingmen with differing capabilities and levels of survivability……
General Atomics is pitching its autonomous collaborative drone known as Gambit as the Air Force’s first CCA. General Atomics unveiled Gambit two years ago, and said its advanced artificial intelligence and autonomous software will help provide high-quality intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and be able to sense and track targets of interest.
General Atomics spokesman C. Mark Brinkley said the company’s CCA design is a derivative of the XQ-67 drone the Air Force Research Laboratory earlier this year flew to test out a “platform sharing” construction concept. Under that approach, the XQ-67 was built on a chassis that could provide a common foundation for multiple kinds of drones, which AFRL said could lower costs and allow greater mass production….
Anduril’s bid for CCA is called Fury. The company said Fury uses its Lattice operating system to provide autonomous capabilities and team up with piloted aircraft during operations.…..
The two firms were part of an initial group of five companies, also including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, that had contracts to work on CCAs. Kendall said in February that the Air Force wanted to whittle that list down to three at first, but said a total of two was more likely due to tight budgets.
The three companies not selected for these contract options will have further opportunities to work on the next wave of the program, the Air Force said….
Hunter said in February that the service is confident the first increment of CCAs will be able to operate autonomously, but that “will be more limited” than what subsequent generations will be able to do……
The Air Force plans to make a decision on a contract to produce the first increment of CCAs in fiscal 2026, and field fully operational drone wingmen by the end of this decade.
The Air Force said it is already planning to develop the second increment of CCAs, and the first activities for this other increment will start later this year…..