Air Force: First CCA Models Pass Critical Design Review as Future Plans Being Debated

The two Collaborative Combat Aircraft designs—one each from Anduril Industries and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems—passed their critical design reviews in early November, clearing the way for detailed production efforts to get underway, the Air Force said Nov. 13. However, the way ahead for future upgrades and increments of CCA remain undecided.

Col. Timothy M. Helfrich, Air Force Materiel Command’s Senior Materiel Leader for the Advanced Aircraft Division, confirmed the milestone following a CCA panel discussion at the inaugural Airpower Futures Forum in Arlington, Va hosted by AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“Both Anduril and General Atomics, both industry teammates, are on the path to first flight, on a timeline that allows us to get operational capability by the end of the decade,” Helfrich said in the panel discussion. “We are on track, if not ahead, in some areas.”

“The lessons that we’ve learned so far is that we need to be able to know when enough is good enough,” he added. “If we are to continue to add capability and gold-plate” the CCAs, “we’re going to miss out on our cost and what’s important in our schedule targets.”

The critical design review is the final step in certifying that a design should meet requirements, and it establishes a program’s baseline. It not only checks a program’s maturity at both the overall and component levels but confirms that there’s a realistic plan for entering production and testing the item.

The Air Force is making “some of those tough trades to say, ‘this is good enough.’ … moving forward has been a challenge because we want a lot, but we are making a decision,” he said.

CCAs are the Air Force’s planned uncrewed, autonomous aircraft that will escort fighters and carry extra weapons for them. They are also expected to engage enemy aircraft on their own. Later versions will likely have roles in air defense suppression, electronic attack, and other air combat missions. Operational capability with the initial versions—in number—is expected before the end of the decade.

Helfrich, in the panel discussion, clarified the nomenclature being used on the CCA program and said it hasn’t been decided how long CCAs will be operated or whether there will be upgrades or all-new versions of CCAs at various intervals.

Anduril and General Atomics are building competing versions of CCA Increment 1, which will be dedicated to the air-to-air mission. The Air Force is still in the process of deciding whether Increment 2 will be a more or less sophisticated aircraft, Helfrich said, and it hasn’t been settled whether either will later be upgraded or simply phased out, as technology and the threat change the service’s needs.

“The Air Force has a lot of learning to do over the coming years,” he said in response to an audience question, “but I do expect that there will be a time where we have a mixture of Increment 1s and Increment 2s; [and] maybe Increment 3 out there.”

He said the mix of CCAs “will change, based on what is necessary to meet our force design and our commitments.”

The funding and expectation for Increment 2 have provided “one of the ways that we’ve been able to control our appetite” for capabilities on Increment 1, Helfrich said.

“Our original plan was—and the funding that was laid in—was for two increments. … You don’t have to get everything into this Increment 1. What we need to do is get it out there, with the minimum viable capability, on time or early, and on-budget or under budget. But Increment 2 …. we are close to getting started in earnest on that.”

There is a government analysis underway for Increment 2 “with other parties…and internal government agencies” to determine the needed attributes of the system.

“And then next year—actually this fiscal year—we will kick off concept refinement, where we then bring in industry to help us further define what those attributes are and whittle down those use cases,” Helfrich said. “It’s really the same approach that we did for CCA Increment 1.”

He also said that studies and experiments so far indicate that pilots of crewed fighters will likely be able to control many more CCAs than originally thought.

Senior USAF leaders have speculated that the CCA program could eventually achieve a rhythm of introducing a new design every two to four years, which would be better for staying abreast of both changing technological opportunities and threats.

Helfrich emphasized that Increment 2 is not a derivative or growth version of Increment 1.

Just because it’s called Increment 2 doesn’t mean it “has more capability … we’re still looking to figure out … the right balance and do the analysis” of the needed capability “to maximize low cost,” he said. The Air Force may yet decide to “change the focus” of CCAs “from a missile truck to something else,” perhaps an electronic warfare platform.

“I think it’s a little too early to say whether or not we’re going to do “Increment 1B or 1C. We’ll have to learn as Increment 1 rolls out and as Increment 2 rolls out, but we do expect them to be complementary,” and that there will be “multiple Increments in the force at the same time.”

Helfrich said the life expectancy of a CCA is also not yet determined. Early concepts called for using the craft for a number of sorties, and then divesting them on one-way missions, with the idea of avoiding the creation of a sustainment enterprise to support them.

“A lot has to do with how you use them,” he later told Air & Space Forces Magazine. While a small number of CCAs may be used for training, most of their missions would likely be practiced in simulators, and the aircraft themselves would be stored in a crate until needed for operations.

Asked if CCA life expectancy would be measured by flight hours, engine cycles, missions or some other metric, Helfrich said it would be flight hours.

With regards to life expectancy, he told the symposium, “a lot of that has to do with how you build your airframe, right? And so you do end up with life expectancy … and that comes down to flight hours, is how that’s typically measured.” But the expected service life will also depend on the “structural load and how much you build it to do. And if you shorten the life expectancy … then you can potentially take out some weight, saving costs or allowing you to bring other things into the airplane.”