Skyborg
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Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
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XQ-67A Combat Drone From General Atomics Breaks Cover
The secretive Off-Board Sensing Station (OBSS) program now has a real aircraft and it’s likely a glimpse of much more to come.
https://t.co/oIIW8AsKt4
The secretive Off-Board Sensing Station (OBSS) program now has a real aircraft and it’s likely a glimpse of much more to come.
https://t.co/oIIW8AsKt4
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
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https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024...ircraft-deals/
US Air Force readies to award collaborative combat aircraft deals
DENVER, Colo. — The Air Force plans to whittle down the number of companies working to build the first batch of collaborative combat aircraft to two or three over the next few months, the service’s secretary said Tuesday.
And the Air Force plans to award contracts for the next round of CCAs — drones loaded with autonomous software that would fly themselves into battle alongside crewed fighters — in fiscal 2025, Frank Kendall said during a roundtable at the Air and Space Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here.
This next round of CCA development could also involve participation by the United States’ closest and “most strategic” international partners, he said.
On the first increment of CCAs, the Air Force has contracts with five companies: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Anduril. Kendall said the Air Force would like to cut that to three, but acknowledged budgetary limitations will make choosing just two companies more likely.
The Air Force plans to field several different types of CCAs, with different capabilities and levels of survivability, to carry out a wide range of missions including strikes, surveillance, jamming, and serving as decoys to draw enemy fire…..
US Air Force readies to award collaborative combat aircraft deals
DENVER, Colo. — The Air Force plans to whittle down the number of companies working to build the first batch of collaborative combat aircraft to two or three over the next few months, the service’s secretary said Tuesday.
And the Air Force plans to award contracts for the next round of CCAs — drones loaded with autonomous software that would fly themselves into battle alongside crewed fighters — in fiscal 2025, Frank Kendall said during a roundtable at the Air and Space Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium here.
This next round of CCA development could also involve participation by the United States’ closest and “most strategic” international partners, he said.
On the first increment of CCAs, the Air Force has contracts with five companies: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Anduril. Kendall said the Air Force would like to cut that to three, but acknowledged budgetary limitations will make choosing just two companies more likely.
The Air Force plans to field several different types of CCAs, with different capabilities and levels of survivability, to carry out a wide range of missions including strikes, surveillance, jamming, and serving as decoys to draw enemy fire…..
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
Thread Starter
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024...f-flying-tech/
F-16s arrive at Eglin to be modified with self-flying tech
The first three F-16 Fighting Falcons that will be loaded with self-flying technology have arrived at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, the Air Force said Tuesday.
The arrival of the F-16s marks the service’s biggest step forward yet in standing up the program known as Venom, which stands for Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model-Autonomy Flying Testbed and aims to speed up the testing of autonomous technology on both crewed and uncrewed aircraft.
The Air Force hopes the autonomous technology tested under Venom could help it more quickly shape plans to create a fleet of self-flying drones that team up with crewed fighters in battle, known as collaborative combat aircraft.
The service is heavily focusing on creating a fleet of at least 1,000 CCAs, which will use autonomous capabilities to fly alongside aircraft such as the F-35 or future Next-Generation Air Dominance family of fighter systems. These drone wingmen would carry missiles or other weapons to strike enemy targets, jam enemy signals through electronic warfare operations or perform reconnaissance missions.
The Air Force is increasingly confident autonomous capabilities have advanced to the point where such aircraft can succeed. But officials say there are still a lot of questions to answer about how the technology will work in action, which led the service to launch Project Venom with a nearly $50 million investment this year.
The service eventually plans to modify six F-16s to serve as test aircraft as part of Venom. It has requested another $7 million for the program in 2025, with the following years’ budgets ranging from $6.1 million to $6.6 million…..
The 96th Test Wing’s 40th Flight Test Squadron and 53rd Wing’s 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron at Eglin will work together to carry out Venom’s developmental and operational testing.….
When Venom’s self-flying F-16s are ready, the Air Force will start testing them with human pilots in the cockpit. Those pilots will take off with the jets and fly them to a testing location, and then allow the autonomous programming to take over in midair. The pilots in the cockpit will keep track of the autonomous software to see whether it works as intended, and make sure all the test objectives are met.
Lt. Col. Joe Gagnon, squadron commander of the 85th, said a human will at all times be ready to start and stop the autonomous algorithms if needed.
“There will never be a time where the Venom aircraft will solely fly by itself without a human component,” he added.
F-16s arrive at Eglin to be modified with self-flying tech
The first three F-16 Fighting Falcons that will be loaded with self-flying technology have arrived at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, the Air Force said Tuesday.
The arrival of the F-16s marks the service’s biggest step forward yet in standing up the program known as Venom, which stands for Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model-Autonomy Flying Testbed and aims to speed up the testing of autonomous technology on both crewed and uncrewed aircraft.
The Air Force hopes the autonomous technology tested under Venom could help it more quickly shape plans to create a fleet of self-flying drones that team up with crewed fighters in battle, known as collaborative combat aircraft.
The service is heavily focusing on creating a fleet of at least 1,000 CCAs, which will use autonomous capabilities to fly alongside aircraft such as the F-35 or future Next-Generation Air Dominance family of fighter systems. These drone wingmen would carry missiles or other weapons to strike enemy targets, jam enemy signals through electronic warfare operations or perform reconnaissance missions.
The Air Force is increasingly confident autonomous capabilities have advanced to the point where such aircraft can succeed. But officials say there are still a lot of questions to answer about how the technology will work in action, which led the service to launch Project Venom with a nearly $50 million investment this year.
The service eventually plans to modify six F-16s to serve as test aircraft as part of Venom. It has requested another $7 million for the program in 2025, with the following years’ budgets ranging from $6.1 million to $6.6 million…..
The 96th Test Wing’s 40th Flight Test Squadron and 53rd Wing’s 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron at Eglin will work together to carry out Venom’s developmental and operational testing.….
When Venom’s self-flying F-16s are ready, the Air Force will start testing them with human pilots in the cockpit. Those pilots will take off with the jets and fly them to a testing location, and then allow the autonomous programming to take over in midair. The pilots in the cockpit will keep track of the autonomous software to see whether it works as intended, and make sure all the test objectives are met.
Lt. Col. Joe Gagnon, squadron commander of the 85th, said a human will at all times be ready to start and stop the autonomous algorithms if needed.
“There will never be a time where the Venom aircraft will solely fly by itself without a human component,” he added.
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
Thread Starter
https://www.twz.com/air/navys-vision...mes-into-focus
Navy’s Vision For Disposable Carrier-Based Loyal Wingman Drones Comes Into Focus
The Navy wants carrier-based drones to cost less than $15 million and be ‘consumed’ as weapons or targets when their short service ends.
The U.S. Navy wants its future fleets of carrier-capable drone wingmen to be made up of designs that cost no more than $15 million to buy and have zero long-term sustainment costs. These uncrewed aircraft would be "consumable," ending their relatively short service lives, which will be measured in hundreds of flight hours rather than years, as one-way kamikaze drones or flying targets for use in training or testing.
The Navy is now actively using the phrase Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) to refer to its planned future drone force. These uncrewed aircraft will be highly autonomous, but still designed primarily to work closely together with crewed platforms, at least initially. The Navy's CCA program is formally intertwined with the Air Force's programof the same name, especially when it comes to architectures that will allow both services to seamlessly exchange control of drones during operations, but the two efforts are distinct.
The Navy is currently aiming to begin fielding the first of its CCA drones sometime in the second half of this decade. The service also has a long-standing goal for the composition of its carrier air wings to eventually become up to 60 percent uncrewed.
"For the U.S. Navy, we are in the development process" and "we're trying to get after CCA in a revolutionary way," Navy Rear Adm. Stephen Tedford, who runs the Program Executive Office for Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons, or PEO (U&W), within Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), said on Monday. Tedford was speaking at the Navy League's annual Sea Air Space conference.
"I don't need them [CCAs] that long," Tedford continued. "I'm ... trying to do this so that my unit cost of the platform is as absolutely low as possible, trying to keep it around the 15 million dollar mark, okay, because I need it to be considered consumable. I want something that's going to fly for a couple hundred hours. It's last hour, it's either a target or a weapon."
"I'm not going to sustain it for 30 years," he added. "So, if you're [sic] any cost estimators out there, those are zeros in sustainment, okay. Just trust me. It's a zero. It's amazing."
The Navy's CCA plans also have the added wrinkle of the drones being expected to operate from the service's aircraft carriers.
"It's not a different way of launch and recovery, it's a different way of looking at risk," Tedford said when asked about how his CCA vision would translate to carrier-based operations. "I'm not trying to design a platform that's going to do cyclic operations on an aircraft carrier the way we know it today, where you're launching and recovering every 45 minutes to an hour and a half."
"That 200 [flight] hours [of total service life] may only have 10 cats and traps," the Rear Admiral added, referring to catapult launches from and arrested recoveries on carriers, which put significant strain on the airframe. "We're trying to limit that scope. ... If I only need to launch it and recover it a handful of times, instead of throughout its [traditional] lifecycle, I can completely change the engineering calculus a lot."
With all this in mind, Tedford said the service's main focus with regard to its CCAs isn't on the underlying drone, but about identifying what that uncrewed platform is expected to do. In turn, the Navy's attention is then on how to get those desired capabilities while staying within the identified cost and other parameters.
"Every time we talk about CCAs, because the last letter is an 'A,' ... they stop thinking about it as a weapon. They need to think about it as a weapon," Tedford explained. "So, we're going to focus on what do I need it to do, what sensors [do we need], and [what] gaps do we need to cover in combat?"
The Rear Admiral also made clear that his vision for CCAs involves buying them in a "rolling wave" of relatively small batches – dozens rather than hundreds at a time. When combined with "consumable" designs, this process will essentially supplant upgrade programs that aircraft might traditionally go through in the mid-life portion of their service.
By doing all this, "I can keep pace with the technology, all the unmanned platforms, but also keep pace with the threat by upgrading sensors, platform systems, weapons, and I can do it at a recurring investment cost," Tedford said......
"If I do try to design something that has 6,000 hours of life, and can do cats and traps all day, I just designed an F/A-18," Tedford said on Monday...... [more]
Navy’s Vision For Disposable Carrier-Based Loyal Wingman Drones Comes Into Focus
The Navy wants carrier-based drones to cost less than $15 million and be ‘consumed’ as weapons or targets when their short service ends.
The U.S. Navy wants its future fleets of carrier-capable drone wingmen to be made up of designs that cost no more than $15 million to buy and have zero long-term sustainment costs. These uncrewed aircraft would be "consumable," ending their relatively short service lives, which will be measured in hundreds of flight hours rather than years, as one-way kamikaze drones or flying targets for use in training or testing.
The Navy is now actively using the phrase Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) to refer to its planned future drone force. These uncrewed aircraft will be highly autonomous, but still designed primarily to work closely together with crewed platforms, at least initially. The Navy's CCA program is formally intertwined with the Air Force's programof the same name, especially when it comes to architectures that will allow both services to seamlessly exchange control of drones during operations, but the two efforts are distinct.
The Navy is currently aiming to begin fielding the first of its CCA drones sometime in the second half of this decade. The service also has a long-standing goal for the composition of its carrier air wings to eventually become up to 60 percent uncrewed.
"For the U.S. Navy, we are in the development process" and "we're trying to get after CCA in a revolutionary way," Navy Rear Adm. Stephen Tedford, who runs the Program Executive Office for Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons, or PEO (U&W), within Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), said on Monday. Tedford was speaking at the Navy League's annual Sea Air Space conference.
"I don't need them [CCAs] that long," Tedford continued. "I'm ... trying to do this so that my unit cost of the platform is as absolutely low as possible, trying to keep it around the 15 million dollar mark, okay, because I need it to be considered consumable. I want something that's going to fly for a couple hundred hours. It's last hour, it's either a target or a weapon."
"I'm not going to sustain it for 30 years," he added. "So, if you're [sic] any cost estimators out there, those are zeros in sustainment, okay. Just trust me. It's a zero. It's amazing."
The Navy's CCA plans also have the added wrinkle of the drones being expected to operate from the service's aircraft carriers.
"It's not a different way of launch and recovery, it's a different way of looking at risk," Tedford said when asked about how his CCA vision would translate to carrier-based operations. "I'm not trying to design a platform that's going to do cyclic operations on an aircraft carrier the way we know it today, where you're launching and recovering every 45 minutes to an hour and a half."
"That 200 [flight] hours [of total service life] may only have 10 cats and traps," the Rear Admiral added, referring to catapult launches from and arrested recoveries on carriers, which put significant strain on the airframe. "We're trying to limit that scope. ... If I only need to launch it and recover it a handful of times, instead of throughout its [traditional] lifecycle, I can completely change the engineering calculus a lot."
With all this in mind, Tedford said the service's main focus with regard to its CCAs isn't on the underlying drone, but about identifying what that uncrewed platform is expected to do. In turn, the Navy's attention is then on how to get those desired capabilities while staying within the identified cost and other parameters.
"Every time we talk about CCAs, because the last letter is an 'A,' ... they stop thinking about it as a weapon. They need to think about it as a weapon," Tedford explained. "So, we're going to focus on what do I need it to do, what sensors [do we need], and [what] gaps do we need to cover in combat?"
The Rear Admiral also made clear that his vision for CCAs involves buying them in a "rolling wave" of relatively small batches – dozens rather than hundreds at a time. When combined with "consumable" designs, this process will essentially supplant upgrade programs that aircraft might traditionally go through in the mid-life portion of their service.
By doing all this, "I can keep pace with the technology, all the unmanned platforms, but also keep pace with the threat by upgrading sensors, platform systems, weapons, and I can do it at a recurring investment cost," Tedford said......
"If I do try to design something that has 6,000 hours of life, and can do cats and traps all day, I just designed an F/A-18," Tedford said on Monday...... [more]
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
Thread Starter
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…..
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…..
