Northrop optimistic about next round of uncrewed fighter development

The company’s YFQ-48A Talon Blue jet logged its first flight in recent weeks.

Military airframer Northrop Grumman is bullish on its prospects to secure a competitive win in future opportunities to build uncrewed fighter jets.

That includes not just the forthcoming second increment of the US Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) programme but also prospects with other US military services and potential overseas customers.

Speaking during a 20 October quarterly earnings call, chief executive Kathy Warden said Northrop is using its YFQ-48A Talon Blue prototype to do risk mitigation and test work that is helping customers in the US and elsewhere define the requirements for the next generation of autonomous fighter jets, which have become known as CCAs.

“We aren’t waiting for direction, but we are engaging with all of our customers to utilise the expertise we have,” Warden says.

Although the YFQ-48 only logged its first sortie earlier this month, Warden says Northrop has more than 500,000 total flight hours across its broader Talon IQ unmanned systems test ecosystem.

“We’re bringing that skill set to bear in two ways,” Wardens says. “One is in how an architecture of CCAs can work and integrate… and then for the platform itself, we are working to drive toward affordability and scaled manufacturing. Because we know that’s going to be important to deliver affordable mass.

“We think that is going to be true across all customers,” she adds.

Bouncing back from Increment One loss

Northrop was passed over for the USAF’s first round of CCA development, as were other defence industry heavyweights like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Instead, the service opted for two much younger companies (sometimes called ‘neoprimes’): General Atomics and Anduril Industries.

Despite the setback, the original primes have not surrendered the CCA space.

Boeing is now a world leader with its Australia-designed-and-built MQ-28 Ghost Bat, while Lockheed is pitching a stealthy, high-performance CCA design called Vectis. Northrop, meanwhile, self-funded a large portion of the Talon Blue development and received the YFQ-48A prototype designation from the USAF in late 2025.

The company has also developed its own autonomy testing ecosystem dubbed Talon IQ. That suite includes the Prism mission autonomy software and the optionally manned Scaled Composites Model 437 aircraft as a test platform.

Talon IQ is also being offered to other private sector operators working on developing autonomous command and control software, Warden says.

The post Northrop optimistic about next round of uncrewed fighter development first appeared on FlightGlobal.

Source: www.flightglobal.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.