Testing Collaborative Combat Aircraft—the unmanned, autonomous aircraft that will fly alongside crewed fighters with the goal of beefing up the future Air Force fleet—will require an unprecedented integration of effort from engineers and operators, leaders of the service’s test enterprise said in a recent interview ...
The Air Force wants to keep the competition for its Collaborative Combat Aircraft program open for as long as possible but will eventually choose a contractor to integrate the air vehicle, autonomy, and mission systems of the $5.8 billion program.
The Air Force is puzzled by House Armed Services Committe defense bill language that divides Collaborative Combat Aircraft into three categories and sets cost limits for each. Secretary Frank Kendall said the construct underlying the HASC language service is "not what we're doing," and the ...
New details of the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program—and how it will work together with similar efforts in the Navy—will emerge from AFA’s Air, Space, and Cyber Conference in September, USAF’s program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft said.
The Air Force’s approach to developing Collaborative Combat Aircraft—the uncrewed, autonomous drones to fly alongside manned aircraft—will “break the mold” of traditional acquisition and sustainment, Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. said July 31. For years, Brown told attendees at the Air Force Life ...
Northrop Grumman won’t bid on the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter, but might go after the Navy's F/A-XX and Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs, company CEO Kathy Warden said July 27.
China has structured its military to defeat the U.S. “kill chain”—the sequence of steps needed to spot and destroy particular targets—and the Air Force must now ensure its process is agile and resilient, largely by investing in new platforms and networks, an expert from the ...
The Air Force plans to get production of the classified AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile underway this year and will equip its new Collaborative Combat Aircraft with the weapon, senior USAF leaders said at a Senate Armed Services Hearing.
The Department of Defense is pushing Congress to give it the authority to start new developmental programs before a budget is approved—a change the Pentagon argues would make critical new programs less vulnerable to Washington gridlock. “Time is going by, and all those things that ...
The Collaborative Combat Aircraft will be operational in the late 2020s, several years before the Next-Generation Air Dominance family of systems, Air Force officials told the House Armed Services tactical aviation panel. The CCAs will first be “shooters,” then electronic warfare platforms, then sensors, in ...
Though touted as “loyal wingmen,” Collaborative Combat Aircraft may not always be paired with crewed aircraft and may function only in concert with one another or weapons in “swarms,” the better to complicate an enemy’s ability to track and counter them, senior Air Force CCA ...
The Air Force is asking for about $6 billion to develop Collaborative Combat Aircraft over the future years defense plan, up from a get-started amount of nearly $400 million in fiscal 2024. One of the first types of CCAs will be for “spectrum warfare,” but ...