What is a Collaborative Combat Aircraft and why is the Air Force betting big on them?

Anduril’s Fury, General Atomics’ Vengeance and Lockheed Martin’s Vectis are all vying to become the Air Force’s next generation of pilotless combat jets — from external weapons bays to AI autopilots that can swap mid-flight. 

John T. Seward is joined by Analiese Rutter of Lockheed Martin’s CCA program and Jason Levin, senior vice president of engineering at Anduril Industries, whose companies showed off their designs at this year’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference. 

Threat Status breaks down the technology behind the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program — and why the service is racing to field hundreds of them.

[SEWARD] The Secretary of the Air Force, Troy Meink, announced that there would be 500 Combat Collaborative Aircraft (CCA) delivered to the Air Force by 2032. This, behind me, is Anduril’s Fury, one of the two aircraft that were announced by the Air Force as officially part of the contract for the CCA. The other part of that contract is a General Atomics Vengeance that was also part of Secretary Meink’s announcement. But the competition for CCA isn’t just these two companies. A lot of major players have gotten into the fray, including Lockheed Martin and Kratos. [RUTTER] We’re really excited about Vectis. It’s Lockheed Martin’s collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA, offering. Our history in unmanned systems actually goes back to the 1960s, all the way when we first launched an unmanned system off an SR-71. [SEWARD] I’m like looking at the actual craft. You guys have got like hard points, but you’ve also, it looks like an internal bay for ordnance. [RUTTER] Internal bay is really important. The shape of the platform is core to our approach. We hear a lot about a mix of CCAs, kind of a high-low mix. Everything from something expendable or attritable all the way up to a survivable asset. We’re playing in that survivable space. We have developed an asset that can take a payload, deliver it to its intended target, and come back home every time. And that’s a key attribute to the system. [SEWARD] Right now, CCA is more focused on air-to-air, but this feels very much like a joint piece of equipment. [RUTTER] Yes, it is actually what we consider a multi-role asset. So the expectation is you have an asset that can perform an air-to-air mission set, air-to-ground, or even an ISR-type mission where it can perform a reconnaissance mission set and deliver that targeting information or on-the-ground know-how back to a manned fighter or assets on the ground. [SEWARD] This is General Atomics’ Vengeance. Now, Vengeance is similar to what we saw a moment ago at the Lockheed Martin booth. It actually has a bay underneath for ordnance and is more focused on survivability. General Atomics says that the way that they’re approaching this problem is being very prepared to scale quickly. One of the things that means is that General Atomics is already looking towards that collaborative fight between the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, whereas some of these other platforms may not have focused on that quite as much. The current numbers show that the General Atomics Vengeance is going to be slightly more expensive than the Anduril Fury. What were some of the design decisions for how y’all built Fury? [LEVIN] We consciously made the deliberate decision to do external carriage. So external carriage has pros and cons, right? So the pros are it’s quick to integrate new weapons, right? We’ve already seen it in some of the shows. Now we’re up to four hard points. And right, we can do things like four air-to-air missiles. We can do 500-pound guided munitions, rocket pods with APTWS. We can integrate FAM, low-cost cruise missiles on these very rapidly. So we can do those integrations very, very quickly for either the U.S. or allies. And then the downside that everyone kind of worries about is like a signature, like an RF signature, right? You see a lot of people with internal bay. If you do an internal bay, you’re going to have a larger aircraft. It’s probably going to be more expensive, won’t be as fast. We need fighter-like performance as cheap as possible and to have the right survivability for the fight. And so people kind of harp on the survivability of external stores. We’ve done hundreds of hours with the U.S. Air Force, thousands of simulations, that not only does this meet survivability and lethality the Air Force wants, it actually exceeds what they’re looking for. [SEWARD] What does the program look like right now for y’all giving this over to the Air Force? [LEVIN] Yeah, so on Fury, which has been named right for the FQ-44 Fury, we’ve made a ton of progress this year. So back in February, we did the first mission autonomy flight with the aircraft. So we took off with the push button. We turned on Shield AI’s mission autonomy. We turned it off. We turned on Anduril’s mission autonomy. We turned it off and we landed. So that was a big milestone to show you can do several different mission autonomies on the same aircraft. In the next couple months, we have big milestones coming up. We’re going to do a multi-ship flight. So one operator on a laptop flying two CCAs, two Furies. And then we’re going to do a quarterback integration. So a fifth-gen fighter will control the aircraft. And then towards the end of the year, we’re going to go to an exercise, a large force exercise. We’re going to go to Emerald Flag, bring multiple Furies. We’re going to do full end-to-end kill chain, quarterback kind of taking control and doing a live-fire shot of this. So really pushing that envelope, keeping that speed through the end of the year. Now, that’ll be just bringing out that initial capability, kind of the MVP. And then all through next year, it’s just expanding that capability, expanding that envelope. So kind of think about it like clearing one piece of the envelope. We’ve proven it can do that. And then it’s like expanding from there. [SEWARD] Anduril has already provided one of these to the U.S. Air Force. By the end of next year, we could see some of this type of aircraft riding alongside F-35s as a pilotless wingman.

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