U.S. Air Force airmen operated a semiautonomous jet-powered combat drone in a series of sorties recently, boosting the service’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program.
The force’s Experimental Operations Unit conducted hands-on testing with Anduril’s YFQ-44A aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base, California, in an effort to utilize “principles of the new Warfighting Acquisition System,” according to a Thursday Air Force release.
Previously, the concept employed by the force was fully human-piloted drones, and now, “there is no operator with a stick and throttle flying the aircraft behind the scenes,” Jason Levin, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering for air dominance and strike, said in an October 2025 company release.
The testing took place sometime last week, according to a Thursday Anduril social media post written by vice president of autonomous airpower Mark Shushnar.
Shushnar said in the post that the EOU gained experience launching, recovering and turning the aircraft during the exercise, and it conducted the pre- and post-flight checks and clearances, weapons loading and unloading and direct tasking of the air vehicle during taxi and flight.
The EOU operators used a ruggedized laptop to upload mission plans, initiate autonomous taxi and takeoff, task the in-flight aircraft and manage post-flight data, Shushnar said, taking out the previous need for fixed infrastructure of a large, established base.
Shushnar highlighted how the YFQ-44A is designed to be easy to maintain with a small crew compared to traditional unmanned aerial vehicles. The exercise demonstrated that, he said. With only a couple days of training, a handful of EOU maintainers were able to turn the aircraft between sorties.
The exercise showcases a move toward “operator-driver experimentation” to find ways to speed up the capability process, per the Air Force’s release.
“By embedding the operators from the EOU with our acquisition professionals, we create a tight feedback loop that lets us trade operational risk with acquisition risk in real-time,” Col. Timothy Helfrich, portfolio acquisition executive for fighters and advanced aircraft, said in the release.
From beginning to end, the exercise was executed by EOU airmen, working alongside Air Force Material Command’s 412th Test Wing, to polish procedures for deploying and sustaining CCA, a trailblazer for the Warfighting Acquisition System, in contested environments, the announcement says.
The release recognized that the EOU’s main objective is to place operators at the center of this process to ensure that the CCA is workable for future conflict by “embedding the warfighter’s voice as the driving force from the beginning.”
The Air Force announced in April 2024 that Anduril and General Automatics were selected to design and create this first batch of drone wingmen. Anduril began flight testing in October 2025 and announced the production for the YFQ-44A Fury CCA in March 2026.
General Automatics announced that their ground testing began May 2025.
Although it is not yet clear how many YFQ-44As the Air Force has ordered from the defense companies, the service has noted they want a fleet of at least 1,000 CCAs for tasks, such as conducting strike missions, carrying out operations and flying alongside manned aircraft, like the F-22, F-35 and F-47 fighter jets.
Despite Anduril and General Automatics both developing aircraft for the Air Force’s CCA program, the service may choose to move forward into the production phase with only one. The Air Force is expected to make that decision sometime this year.
Cristina Stassis is a reporter covering stories surrounding the defense industry, national security, military/veteran affairs and more. She previously worked as an editorial fellow for Defense News in 2024 where she assisted the newsroom in breaking news across Sightline Media Group.
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