Anduril’s YFQ-44A Fury Fighter Drone Completes First Flight for U.S. Air Force Next-Gen Air Combat
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Anduril’s YFQ-44A jet drone completed its first semi-autonomous flight on October 31, 2025, in California, marking a key step in the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program and placing it in direct competition with General Atomics’ YFQ-42A ahead of a production decision.
On Friday, 31 October 2025, Anduril Industries and the U.S. Air Force confirmed that the company’s jet-powered YFQ-44A carried out its first semi-autonomous flight, a milestone officially announced by Dr. Jason Levin, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Anduril Industries. This flight is the latest visible step in the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, the ambitious effort to field affordable, intelligent, combat-ready uncrewed aircraft alongside crewed fighters in the second half of the decade. It also confirms that Anduril, a newcomer compared with legacy primes, is able to turn a clean-sheet design into a flying combat prototype in just 556 days, a tempo rarely seen in modern U.S. military aviation. The test, conducted in California, comes only weeks after the rival YFQ-42A from General Atomics entered flight testing, putting the two Increment 1 competitors head-to-head for the future of U.S. airpower.
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Anduril’s YFQ-44A “Fury” is a single-engine, jet-powered, semi-autonomous loyal-wingman designed to operate alongside crewed fighters, built in a rapid 556-day development cycle for high-speed, attritable combat roles that extend U.S. airpower through affordable, AI-enabled manned-unmanned teaming (Picture Source: Anduril/Army Recognition Group)
The aircraft at the center of Friday’s announcement is not a remote-controlled drone in the classical sense. From taxi to landing, the YFQ-44A was run in a semi-autonomous mode, executing a preplanned mission profile, managing its own flight controls and throttle, and returning under human supervision but not human stick-and-throttle control. This is exactly the operating model the Air Force wants for CCA: aircraft that can team with F-35s, NGAD derivatives or upgraded F-15/16s, receive tasking, fuse sensor data and prosecute targets without forcing a human pilot to micromanage every maneuver. Anduril stresses that this is not an afterthought but the core of the design: the autonomy stack was integrated from day one and tested from the first flight, not added after the airframe was proven. That approach shortens the learning loop and demonstrates to the Air Force, to allies and to potential foreign customers that the aircraft is being built to fight, not merely to fly.
Technically, YFQ-44A sits in the emerging class of jet-powered, fighterlike uncrewed aircraft designed to operate in heavily contested airspace. It is meant to help a manned formation gain and maintain air superiority by extending sensors forward, carrying electronic warfare payloads, providing additional weapons stations, or simply soaking up enemy missiles instead of a human pilot. The Air Force description of CCA calls this “affordable mass”: putting enough platforms on the ramp that a peer adversary cannot win a one-for-one exchange. Anduril’s aircraft is designed to deliver that mass through a combination of an autonomy-first architecture, a software backbone (ArsenalOS) that also manages maintenance and configuration, and a production philosophy based on commercial, low-risk processes rather than exotic aerospace tooling. The company is already tying the program to its 5 million square foot Arsenal-1 facility in Columbus, Ohio, where prototype production is scheduled to start in the first half of 2026, which is unusually early for a platform that only just flew.
What makes Friday’s flight strategically important is that Anduril has now matched General Atomics, whose YFQ-42A flew on 27 August 2025, meaning the Air Force finally has two real aircraft in the air to test manned-unmanned tactics, sensor sharing and collaborative weapons employment. The service has said for two years that it wanted competition to drive down costs and accelerate delivery; now, competition is real and visible. Both airframes will feed data into the same CCA experimentation track, but they take slightly different industrial and design paths: GA leverages decades of UAV production experience, while Anduril is betting on speed, software and a broader labor pool. For the Air Force, that is welcome: it badly needs a break from the long, expensive, highly bespoke fighter programs of the past, and CCA is the first program in decades where two clean-sheet, combat-oriented U.S. drones are flying within the same quarter.
The operational logic is clear when viewed through the lens of the Indo-Pacific. U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that the People’s Liberation Army Air Force is fielding new crewed and uncrewed platforms at a “frantic pace,” closing the window in which a small number of exquisite U.S. aircraft could dominate the battlespace. CCA is Washington’s answer to that problem: instead of buying only very expensive fighters that are risky to deploy inside Chinese air defenses, the Air Force wants hundreds, and ultimately more than a thousand, autonomous or semi-autonomous aircraft that can be surged, lost and rapidly replaced while preserving human pilots for the most complex missions. Anduril’s rapid flight test therefore has geopolitical weight: it is a signal to Beijing and to U.S. allies in the region that the United States can actually turn the autonomy narrative into metal, software and flying combat power. It also offers a counterpoint to the troubled Replicator effort, which has struggled to get enough reliable drones into the field on time.
On the budgetary side, CCA remains one of the Air Force’s big-ticket innovation lines. Planning documents and senior leaders have pointed to about 8.9 billion dollars programmed between fiscal years 2025 and 2029 for CCA, with an earlier 2025 request of roughly 550 to 560 million dollars to keep Increment 1 on schedule. The service still talks about a per-aircraft target in the 25 to 30 million dollar range, i.e. one-third to one-quarter of an F-35A, but only if industry can sustain the simple, high-rate production model it is proposing. Friday’s flight makes Anduril the second company, after GA, to demonstrate that it is far enough along to justify continued funding. The last competitive contract decision that shaped today’s lineup was the April 2024 downselect, when the Air Force pushed Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman out of Increment 1 and kept only Anduril and General Atomics in funded development. The Air Force still aims to make the real production decision in fiscal 2026, so every successful flight in 2025 counts toward that choice.
Compared with earlier loyal-wingman concepts such as the XQ-58A Valkyrie or Australia’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat, YFQ-44A represents a sharper push toward autonomy at combat speeds and toward immediate manufacturability inside the U.S. industrial base. Valkyrie showed that attritable jet drones could fly alongside fighters, but it relied heavily on traditional test sequencing and was not built from the outset for the kind of Arsenal-1, broad-labor-pool production Anduril describes. MQ-28, meanwhile, is optimized for Australian requirements and alliance exportability. CCA is more aggressive: it wants teaming, electronic warfare, sensing and weapons all fielded quickly and at scale, and it wants the software to be the constant while the hardware iterates. That is why integrating autonomy from the first taxi runs, as Anduril did, matters more than pure performance numbers. It is a model far closer to commercial aviation and even to the smartphone world than to the 20-year F-35 cycle.
The military implications for U.S. aviation are therefore threefold. First, the Air Force now has proof that the autonomy it has been testing in AI-piloted F-16s can migrate into clean-sheet uncrewed airframes and still meet fighter-like performance standards. Second, the service gains leverage over the industry because there are at least two viable suppliers inside the program, which should help it resist price creep as quantities grow. Third, the U.S. can present this as an alliance-relevant capability at NATO, AUKUS and bilateral levels, at a moment when European and Indo-Pacific partners are also looking for uncrewed combat aircraft but are years behind in flight testing. A U.S. CCA that enters rate production in 2026-27 and can be manufactured in Ohio using standard processes will be politically and logistically easier to share or co-produce than a one-off stealth demonstrator.
Friday’s flight of the YFQ-44A ultimately shows that the United States is not condemned to decades-long airpower programs. A nontraditional defense company, partnered closely with the Air Force, has just moved from concept to flying, semi-autonomous combat aircraft in under two years, at the exact moment when U.S. planners say time is the scarcest resource. If Anduril can now keep flight tests regular, mature the collaborative behaviors with crewed fighters and prove that Arsenal-1 can really build these aircraft at rate, it will have set a new baseline for how fast Washington can arm itself for a high-end fight in the Pacific. That, more than the single test in California, is why this first flight matters.
Written by Teoman S. Nicanci – Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group
Teoman S. Nicanci holds degrees in Political Science, Comparative and International Politics, and International Relations and Diplomacy from leading Belgian universities, with research focused on Russian strategic behavior, defense technology, and modern warfare. He is a defense analyst at Army Recognition, specializing in the global defense industry, military armament, and emerging defense technologies.
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Anduril’s YFQ-44A jet drone completed its first semi-autonomous flight on October 31, 2025, in California, marking a key step in the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program and placing it in direct competition with General Atomics’ YFQ-42A ahead of a production decision.
On Friday, 31 October 2025, Anduril Industries and the U.S. Air Force confirmed that the company’s jet-powered YFQ-44A carried out its first semi-autonomous flight, a milestone officially announced by Dr. Jason Levin, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Anduril Industries. This flight is the latest visible step in the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, the ambitious effort to field affordable, intelligent, combat-ready uncrewed aircraft alongside crewed fighters in the second half of the decade. It also confirms that Anduril, a newcomer compared with legacy primes, is able to turn a clean-sheet design into a flying combat prototype in just 556 days, a tempo rarely seen in modern U.S. military aviation. The test, conducted in California, comes only weeks after the rival YFQ-42A from General Atomics entered flight testing, putting the two Increment 1 competitors head-to-head for the future of U.S. airpower.
Anduril’s YFQ-44A “Fury” is a single-engine, jet-powered, semi-autonomous loyal-wingman designed to operate alongside crewed fighters, built in a rapid 556-day development cycle for high-speed, attritable combat roles that extend U.S. airpower through affordable, AI-enabled manned-unmanned teaming (Picture Source: Anduril/Army Recognition Group)
The aircraft at the center of Friday’s announcement is not a remote-controlled drone in the classical sense. From taxi to landing, the YFQ-44A was run in a semi-autonomous mode, executing a preplanned mission profile, managing its own flight controls and throttle, and returning under human supervision but not human stick-and-throttle control. This is exactly the operating model the Air Force wants for CCA: aircraft that can team with F-35s, NGAD derivatives or upgraded F-15/16s, receive tasking, fuse sensor data and prosecute targets without forcing a human pilot to micromanage every maneuver. Anduril stresses that this is not an afterthought but the core of the design: the autonomy stack was integrated from day one and tested from the first flight, not added after the airframe was proven. That approach shortens the learning loop and demonstrates to the Air Force, to allies and to potential foreign customers that the aircraft is being built to fight, not merely to fly.
Technically, YFQ-44A sits in the emerging class of jet-powered, fighterlike uncrewed aircraft designed to operate in heavily contested airspace. It is meant to help a manned formation gain and maintain air superiority by extending sensors forward, carrying electronic warfare payloads, providing additional weapons stations, or simply soaking up enemy missiles instead of a human pilot. The Air Force description of CCA calls this “affordable mass”: putting enough platforms on the ramp that a peer adversary cannot win a one-for-one exchange. Anduril’s aircraft is designed to deliver that mass through a combination of an autonomy-first architecture, a software backbone (ArsenalOS) that also manages maintenance and configuration, and a production philosophy based on commercial, low-risk processes rather than exotic aerospace tooling. The company is already tying the program to its 5 million square foot Arsenal-1 facility in Columbus, Ohio, where prototype production is scheduled to start in the first half of 2026, which is unusually early for a platform that only just flew.
What makes Friday’s flight strategically important is that Anduril has now matched General Atomics, whose YFQ-42A flew on 27 August 2025, meaning the Air Force finally has two real aircraft in the air to test manned-unmanned tactics, sensor sharing and collaborative weapons employment. The service has said for two years that it wanted competition to drive down costs and accelerate delivery; now, competition is real and visible. Both airframes will feed data into the same CCA experimentation track, but they take slightly different industrial and design paths: GA leverages decades of UAV production experience, while Anduril is betting on speed, software and a broader labor pool. For the Air Force, that is welcome: it badly needs a break from the long, expensive, highly bespoke fighter programs of the past, and CCA is the first program in decades where two clean-sheet, combat-oriented U.S. drones are flying within the same quarter.
The operational logic is clear when viewed through the lens of the Indo-Pacific. U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that the People’s Liberation Army Air Force is fielding new crewed and uncrewed platforms at a “frantic pace,” closing the window in which a small number of exquisite U.S. aircraft could dominate the battlespace. CCA is Washington’s answer to that problem: instead of buying only very expensive fighters that are risky to deploy inside Chinese air defenses, the Air Force wants hundreds, and ultimately more than a thousand, autonomous or semi-autonomous aircraft that can be surged, lost and rapidly replaced while preserving human pilots for the most complex missions. Anduril’s rapid flight test therefore has geopolitical weight: it is a signal to Beijing and to U.S. allies in the region that the United States can actually turn the autonomy narrative into metal, software and flying combat power. It also offers a counterpoint to the troubled Replicator effort, which has struggled to get enough reliable drones into the field on time.
On the budgetary side, CCA remains one of the Air Force’s big-ticket innovation lines. Planning documents and senior leaders have pointed to about 8.9 billion dollars programmed between fiscal years 2025 and 2029 for CCA, with an earlier 2025 request of roughly 550 to 560 million dollars to keep Increment 1 on schedule. The service still talks about a per-aircraft target in the 25 to 30 million dollar range, i.e. one-third to one-quarter of an F-35A, but only if industry can sustain the simple, high-rate production model it is proposing. Friday’s flight makes Anduril the second company, after GA, to demonstrate that it is far enough along to justify continued funding. The last competitive contract decision that shaped today’s lineup was the April 2024 downselect, when the Air Force pushed Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman out of Increment 1 and kept only Anduril and General Atomics in funded development. The Air Force still aims to make the real production decision in fiscal 2026, so every successful flight in 2025 counts toward that choice.
Compared with earlier loyal-wingman concepts such as the XQ-58A Valkyrie or Australia’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat, YFQ-44A represents a sharper push toward autonomy at combat speeds and toward immediate manufacturability inside the U.S. industrial base. Valkyrie showed that attritable jet drones could fly alongside fighters, but it relied heavily on traditional test sequencing and was not built from the outset for the kind of Arsenal-1, broad-labor-pool production Anduril describes. MQ-28, meanwhile, is optimized for Australian requirements and alliance exportability. CCA is more aggressive: it wants teaming, electronic warfare, sensing and weapons all fielded quickly and at scale, and it wants the software to be the constant while the hardware iterates. That is why integrating autonomy from the first taxi runs, as Anduril did, matters more than pure performance numbers. It is a model far closer to commercial aviation and even to the smartphone world than to the 20-year F-35 cycle.
The military implications for U.S. aviation are therefore threefold. First, the Air Force now has proof that the autonomy it has been testing in AI-piloted F-16s can migrate into clean-sheet uncrewed airframes and still meet fighter-like performance standards. Second, the service gains leverage over the industry because there are at least two viable suppliers inside the program, which should help it resist price creep as quantities grow. Third, the U.S. can present this as an alliance-relevant capability at NATO, AUKUS and bilateral levels, at a moment when European and Indo-Pacific partners are also looking for uncrewed combat aircraft but are years behind in flight testing. A U.S. CCA that enters rate production in 2026-27 and can be manufactured in Ohio using standard processes will be politically and logistically easier to share or co-produce than a one-off stealth demonstrator.
Friday’s flight of the YFQ-44A ultimately shows that the United States is not condemned to decades-long airpower programs. A nontraditional defense company, partnered closely with the Air Force, has just moved from concept to flying, semi-autonomous combat aircraft in under two years, at the exact moment when U.S. planners say time is the scarcest resource. If Anduril can now keep flight tests regular, mature the collaborative behaviors with crewed fighters and prove that Arsenal-1 can really build these aircraft at rate, it will have set a new baseline for how fast Washington can arm itself for a high-end fight in the Pacific. That, more than the single test in California, is why this first flight matters.
Written by Teoman S. Nicanci – Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group
Teoman S. Nicanci holds degrees in Political Science, Comparative and International Politics, and International Relations and Diplomacy from leading Belgian universities, with research focused on Russian strategic behavior, defense technology, and modern warfare. He is a defense analyst at Army Recognition, specializing in the global defense industry, military armament, and emerging defense technologies.
