The U.S. Air Force plans to refine its concept for the future Increment 2 of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).
“Increment 2–we are ‘danger’ close to getting started in earnest on that,” Col. Timothy Helfrich, the senior materiel leader for Air Force Materiel Command’s advanced aircraft division, told the inaugural Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies’ future airpower forum in Arlington, Va.
“We’re doing government analysis right now with FFRDCs [federally funded research development centers] and internal government agencies to look to make sure we understand the right mission use cases for Increment 2 and the top level attributes,” he said. “Next year–actually, this fiscal year–we will kick off concept refinement where we bring in industry to help us further refine what those attributes are and whittle down those use cases. It’s the same approach we did for CCA Increment 1, but now CCA Increment 1 is a new player in the environment as we do the analysis. You’ll see us begin concept refinement later this year.”
The first CCAs are to be air-to-air, but others may be those for intelligence or jamming missions. The Air Force has said that it plans to field 150 CCAs in the next five years to complement F-35s and possibly other manned fighters, including a manned Next Generation Air Dominance aircraft and the F-15EX.
In April, the Air Force said that it had chosen privately-held drone makers, General Atomics and Anduril, for the first round of CCA–the so-called Increment 1 (Defense Daily, Apr. 24). General Atomics offered its Gambit design and Anduril its Fury.
The companies beat defense industry heavyweights Boeing [BA], Lockheed Martin [LMT], and Northrop Grumman [NOC], though these companies and others are free to bid on future CCA increments.
Increment 2 may feature more advanced, stealthier designs than Increment 1.
Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter said on Tuesday that the service is buying more CCAs for Increment 1 testing.
General Atomics and Anduril may conduct first flights in the next year of their Fury and Gambit offerings for the first increment of CCA–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 (Defense Daily, Sept. 17).
“The additional buy for the Air Force helps ensure that warfighters will have ample opportunity for experimentation to support operational fielding before the end of the decade,” Diem Salmon, Anduril’s vice president for air dominance and strike, said in a company statement on Tuesday in response to Hunter’s disclosure of a planned buy of more Increment 1 CCAs.
What may help CCA attain a unit cost goal of $30 million is a short
logistics “tail” that Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin discussed on Oct. 31 (Defense Daily, Oct. 31).