The Air Force's first application of low-cost attritable aircraft systems will be as stealthy, jamming adversary systems for F-22 and F-35 fighters to practice against, Gen. Mark D. Kelly, head of Air Combat Command, said in a virtual seminar presented by the Air Force's Life ...
The Skyborg software and hardware suite allowing unmanned aircraft to team with crewed ones flew for the first time April 29, the Air Force said, launching a series of experiments meant to prove the safety and effectiveness of the approach.
The U.S. military needs to wake up to the fact that global dominance is no longer a viable strategy for national defense, because pursuing that unrealizable goal is making the country less safe, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said April 22. Emerging ...
The Air Force demonstrated the successful launch of a drone by a larger remotely piloted aircraft on March 26, with the XQ-58A Valkyrie releasing a small UAS from its own internal weapons bay. The flight test, the sixth for the Valkyrie, marked the first time ...
The Pentagon could save a lot of money on personnel and increase force structure with expanded use of “remotely crewed” systems, but the diversity of size and application of such systems demands specialized thinking, rather than just lumping them together as “drones,” according to experts ...
Former Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper's transformational ideas on how to buy new systems will stay on track without him, senior service officials said Feb. 24. Digital engineering, agile software development, and open architectures will play a part in all new systems. But sticking ...
Lawmakers weighed in on three of the Air Force’s top-priority technology development efforts in the final draft of the fiscal 2021 defense policy bill, offering more money and more oversight as the programs mature. The Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Technology initiative, hypersonic weapons, and the Next-Generation ...
Low-cost, attritable aircraft will likely reshape the fleet design outlined in “The Air Force We Need” white paper of 2018, panelists said during an Oct. 1 event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. The technology's rapid advance is causing service force designers to ...
The Air Force Research Laboratory’s robotic pilot has returned to the sky, following a mishap that grounded the system last year. The AFRL Center for Rapid Innovation and DZYNE Technologies Incorporated’s ROBOPilot flew for about 2.2 hours on Sept. 24 at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. ...
A document justifying the Air Force's purchase of potentially $23 billion worth of F-15EX fighters from Boeing indicates the Air Force could buy even more, replacing not only the aging F-15C/D fleet but also its somewhat younger F-15E ground attack stablemate. The heavily redacted document ...