Well, sounds like those loyal wingman dreams are becoming a reality.
Yesterday, the Air Force announced that they’ve awarded production contracts to Anduril and General Atomics for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, a whole four months ahead of schedule.
The contracts (amount undisclosed) will cover “Increment 1 air vehicles as well as mission autonomy software, in a push to rapidly field advanced combat capabilities,” per the service.
The Air Force said it was awarding the “engineering and manufacturing development and production contracts” to both companies because “the FQ-42 [GA’s model] and FQ-44 [Anduril’s model] meet rigorous mission requirements and are ready for full-scale manufacturing.”
Plus, the service has downselected Anduril’s Lattice for Mission Autonomy, Shield AI’s Hivemind, and RTX-Collins’ autonomy stack to keep competing for the autonomy brains in the next phase of the program.
Gosh. Everyone really does love a tiny little plane.
Honey, I shrunk the plane: If you read Tectonic, you know about CCA, so we’ll keep this quick.
- The program is the Air Force’s effort to build littler fighter jet-like drones that can fly (and fight) alongside manned aircraft.
- Anduril and General Atomics won the competition to build production-ready prototypes for the Air Force program in April 2024. GA’s YFQ-42A prototype model took flight for the first time in August 2025, and Anduril’s took off last November.
- Shield AI and RTX are building the autonomy brains for the tiny little planes—Shield teamed up with Anduril on the YFQ-44A, while RTX subsidiary Collins Aerospace will work on General Atomics’ version (the YFQ-42A).
- The drone-fighters are expected to cost around a third of the price of manned fighters—around $25-30M a pop—and the Air Force wants to buy hundreds of them by the end of the decade.
- Oh, and now that the two companies are on production contracts, we’ve got a bit of a name change—the Y meant they were prototypes. Now it’s just FQ-42 and FQ-44.
Speedy quick: With these new contracts, it sounds like the Air Force is keeping its word on getting these bad boys fielded quickly.
- Per Anduril, this contract will cover initial delivery of “semi-autonomous” FQ-44s for “continued testing, validation, and, ultimately, operational fielding.”
- The company also says this sets the stage for the Air Force “to buy additional lots of production FQ-44 aircraft across the next several years.”
- Right now, Anduril says that it already has “multiple aircraft flying regularly” and that it’s completed “dozens of sorties from multiple airfields, in multiple mission configurations.”
- They’ve also integrated inert air-to-air munitions, and, per the company, completed an exercise with the Air Force’s Experimental Operations Unit to demonstrate that FQ-44 can get set up and fly without all of the hullabaloo of a huge base.
- And it sounds like that big ol’ Ohio factory—Arsenal 1—will come in handy. Currently, the company says it has the capacity to churn out 150 of these aircraft a year.
GA, for its part, says it’s been “preparing for this order” and that manufacturing is already “well underway.”
- The company says it went from contract award to first flight in just fifteen months, which, for a prime, is pretty darn speedy.
“By moving fast from competitive selection into full-scale manufacturing, we position ourselves to field highly credible and combat-ready semi-autonomous systems to stay ahead of the pacing challenge,” SecAF Troy Meink said in a statement. “These contracts reaffirm our confidence in the strategic path forward for the program to procure over 150 combat-capable CCA by the end of the decade.”