Anduril Industries and General Atomics may conduct first flights in the next year of their Fury and Gambit offerings for the first increment of the U.S. Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program–first flights that could result soon thereafter in the beginning of developmental test (DT) under the Air Force CCA Experimental Operations Unit at Nellis AFB, Nev.’s 53rd Wing.
On display at the conference are what the companies call full-scale representations of their CCAs. Anduril’s Fury has a lower engine inlet, is smaller and will likely carry external air-to-air weapons, while General Atomics’ Gambit is larger, has an upper body engine inlet and internal weapons bay.
Anduril’s lower engine inlet shares design commonality with other fighters, while General Atomics’ upper body inlet may give it a lower radar cross section in some flight regimes and more suitability for stark take-off and landing in which foreign object damage could pose a significant problem.
The long pole in the tent for CCA is full autonomy for launch, mission completion, and recovery. DT could aid in ironing out any wrinkles in autonomy.
Operations and maintenance supplies and how to’s are also questions to be resolved for CCA, and there is some thought that the Air Force could keep CCAs in hangars until their use.
The Air Force has talked about 3 to 5 CCAs under the control of a Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35 or manned Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter for the air-to-air mission, but Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said on Monday that the conceptual number of CCAs per manned fighter is now higher (Defense Daily, Sept. 16).
The Air Force is deciding on whether manned NGAD will go forward–a decision in the coming months that is to gain insights from an Air Force NGAD panel headed by Tim Grayson, a special assistant to Kendall and a former head of DARPA’s strategic technology office and CIA intelligence officer.
Estimates have pegged the unit cost of a manned NGAD in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but Kendall said that he is targeting a much lower unit cost akin to an F-35, a cost that would mean perhaps shaving $200 million from previous unit cost estimates for manned NGAD.