Shield AI completes assembly of first X-Bat prototype

The single-engined VTOL jet was assembled in Frisco, Texas, before moving to Kansas for flight testing.

American defence manufacturer Shield AI has completed assembly of its first X-Bat fighter jet prototype.

The single-engined, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL)-capable uncrewed aircraft was built in Frisco, Texas, at Shield’s X-Forge 1 site. The lead X-Bat now moves to Newton City-County airport in Kansas for flight testing and evaluation at X-Forge 2.

A first flight is planned before the end of 2026.

A video of the jet provided by Shield closely resembles many of the renderings and models the company has displayed since announcing the X-Bat in late 2025. It has a tailless, blended-wing body with a recessed air intake housed in the nose section. The lead prototype uses a delta-wing shape, rather than the ‘cranked kite’ mould line that the earliest X-Bat renderings depicted.

That change had been telegraphed in subsequent renderings and subscale physical models produced over the past year.

Shield tells FlightGlobal that the test campaign will start with the X-Bat vehicle in the horizontal position, sitting on its mobile launch and recovery rail system and firing the aircraft’s GE Aerospace F110 turbofan engine.

“Then we bring it up vertical and run the engine and the vehicle vertically,” the company says.

Armor Harris, inventor of the X-Bat and senior vice-president of Shield AI, told FlightGlobal in an interview that initial vertical flight testing will be accomplished by suspending the uncrewed fighter from a large crane.

“The area that we’re really wanting to science is take-off and landing in close proximity to the ground,” Harris says.

Unlike traditional jets, or even existing VTOL fighters like the BAE Systems/McDonnell Douglas Harrier and Lockheed Martin F-35B, the X-Bat will not take off in the horizontal position from wheeled landing gear. Instead, the uncrewed jet will launch and land from the tail-sitting position using a rail system.

Key to that approach is GE Aerospace’s Axisymmetric Vectoring Exhaust Nozzle (AVEN) system, which equips a standard F110 with omnidirectional thrust vectoring capability. Testing on that system, which was developed in the 1990s for the F-16, is already underway.

Shield says the idea behind the X-Bat is to create a tactical combat aircraft that is not reliant on vulnerable fixed runways but can instead operate from dispersed land positions or ship decks.

Shield AI co-founder Brandon Tseng says the new fighter was designed with a very specific problem in mind.

“How do you create geographically distributed long-range fires with very, very low cost per effect against an adversary like China?” he told FlightGlobal in a May interview.

Despite its unorthodox appearance, both Harris and fellow Shield co-founder, Ryan Tseng, say much of the X-Bat’s test programme will be quite conventional, with the exception of the phase examining vertical flight near the ground, which will be frontloaded in the process.

“From there, it will be a very traditional test campaign,” Ryan Tseng told FlightGlobal in September. “Really, the only unique element is going to be showing that vertical take-off and landing component, which we’re doing up front, because the world, I think rightly, sees that as the most novel aspect of the aircraft. They would assign that the most risk.”

He says Shield plans to “run toward that risk” and “retire it” as early in the process as possible.

The company tells FlightGlobal its plan is to widen the X-Bat’s launch and recovery envelope “as wide as possible” throughout testing. A fully missionised version will fly in 2028, with production starting in 2029.

The X-Bat will be a multi-role fighter in the Group 5 UAS category. It will feature internal weapons bays comparable to those on an F-35 and carry an advanced suite of onboard sensors.

Shield has partnered with munitions and sensor manufacturer Raytheon, which will supply the radar and electronic warfare systems for the X-Bat. The unmanned aircraft will fly autonomously using Shield AI’s Hivemind software, including launch and landing.

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