For everyone who thought we were done with the tiny plane mania for a while, think again. Anduril is back, baby. On Friday afternoon, the defense tech megalith announced that its YFQ-44A prototype for the collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) program has officially notched its first flight in California.
“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,” Anduril SVP of Engineering for Air Dominance & Strike Jason Levin wrote in a blog post.
SecAF Troy E. Meink confirmed the flight test in a post on X (tell us your government is shut down without telling us your government is shut down).
“This milestone shows how competition drives innovation & accelerates delivery,” he wrote. “It also gives us the hard data we need to shape requirements, reduce risk, and ensure the CCA program delivers combat capability on a pace and scale that keeps us ahead of the threat.”
Now that they’re airborne, Anduril says it will keep flight testing and work up to a “first shot” test (read: make a missile go boom off the CCA) next year. It’ll also move YFQ-44A production to its much-anticipated Arsenal-1 facility in Ohio in H1 2026. Factories of the future, here we come.
Lightning fast: Are you bored with CCA yet? Because man, oh man, has there been a lot of news about these little unmanned fighters lately.
Long story short: The US Air Force (and now the Navy, and potentially also the Army) wants small, unmanned fighters that can fly (and fight) alongside traditional manned fighters, like the F-35.
The idea is that these littler, cheaper planes can act as a force multiplier for more exquisite aircraft (and their highly trained human pilots).
- Anduril acquired Blue Force Technologies way back in 2023 and built on its autonomous aircraft model for its CCA.
- Anduril and General Atomics won the competition to build production-ready prototypes for the Army program in April 2024. GA’s YFQ-42A model took flight for the first time in August 2025.
- Back then, Anduril said its first “semi-autonomous” flight test was slated for October. FWIW, the plane took off on October 31—we love a spooky buzzer beater.
- Back in September, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works also revealed that they are building an internally-funded CCA concept called Vectis. The primes really hate to miss out on the fun, don’t they?
- Shield AI and RTX have also reportedly been tapped for the “brains” (the mission autonomy piece) of the CCA program.
Across the pond, European defense tech giant Helsing has also gotten in on the unmanned fighter hype: Back in September, the company unveiled a concept for a European variant called the CA-1 Europa.
Pushing buttons: Anduril declined to give too many deets on the flight, but bystander photos and video show the drone, like, actually flying alongside an L-29 chase plane. Levin said that the flight was, indeed, semi-autonomous.
“It’s basically a human on the loop, controlling it with push buttons,” he said. “The flight was done via a pilot hitting taxi, a pilot hitting takeoff, and, you know, a pilot hitting recover…then the aircraft performing all these maneuvers on its own.”
- The flight software was Anduril’s own—Levin said he couldn’t comment on what may or may not be used for mission autonomy in the future (despite the reporting that it would be Shield AI’s Hivemind).
- Levin said it took a little bit longer than expected to get CCA off the ground because they wanted to “make sure [the software] was completely ready for first flights.”
- When looking at things like weapons integration, Levin said he “[doesn’t] anticipate any software risk on this integration at all.”
Levin couldn’t say how many YFQ-44A’s had been built, or what stage of development they were in. But he did say that when Arsenal-1 comes online next year, it will be able to “support the increment one demand that the US Air Force has for CCA.” The CCA program will be the first built out of the modern mega-factory.
“We’re scaling up that facility to build hundreds of aircraft to meet the demand,” he added.
All the way up: From here, now that they’ve worked out a lot of the autonomy piece, Levin said that Anduril will work with the Air Force to test YFQ-44A’s other capabilities—including weapons integration and manned-unmanned teaming.
“We feel confident that’ll get us pretty quickly into the live shot, multi-ship autonomous flight, and then autonomous flight with crewed aircraft,” he said.
Plus, this will help with some of their other pet projects—including the Navy CCA. (Yes, they’ve been tapped for that, too.)
“If we were going to build any other CCA…we would use a lot of the same subsystems and components and learnings and design process that we’re using on YFQ-44A,” he said. “Each time we’re going into one of these tests [it’s] just proving our process, proving our systems, and reducing risk for a future Navy CCA.”
The behemoth just keeps on growing.