The United States Air Force has flown its two Collaborative Combat Aircraft prototypes during an Agile Combat Employment exercise at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, generating multiple sorties and integrating the uncrewed aircraft with manned platforms in local airspace, the service stated.
The multi-day event was run by the Collaborative Combat Aircraft Experimental Operations Unit, the Air Force organisation designated to develop employment concepts for the aircraft. According to the service, the exercise was intended to build the foundational tactics, techniques and procedures that will govern how CCA are integrated into the force, moving the aircraft out of sterile test conditions and into the hands of operational crews.
Both types took part. Imagery released by the Air Force shows the YFQ-42A, referred to in the release as Dark Merlin, landing at Creech on 22 July, and the YFQ-44A Fury on the flight line the previous day during weapons loading procedures, refuelling and startup. Airmen loaded inert AIM-120 air-to-air missiles onto a Fury during the exercise, work the service says provided information needed to validate the reduced logistical footprint required to operate the aircraft from remote, forward locations.
Air Force Chief of Staff General Ken Wilsbach, quoted in the release, tied the programme to the wider air superiority problem. “Air superiority in today’s increasingly contested environments requires the rapid fielding of affordable mass,” he said, adding that integrating uncrewed systems to fly alongside airmen extends reach and increases lethality.
Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Jensen, the Experimental Operations Unit commander, said in the release that the exercise was about getting the systems into the hands of the warfighter, and that the unit is focused on operating the aircraft outside a traditional test environment in order to learn and iterate quickly.
Members of the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center observed the event under what the service describes as a new rapid operational testing procedure. Brigadier General Jesse Friedel, the centre’s commander, said test teams can draw on warfighter-run exercises of this kind to gather and analyse data supporting fielding decisions ahead of the normal process.
Personnel from the Royal Netherlands Air and Space Force also observed the Fury at Creech. The two countries are working together on platform-agnostic, open architecture semi-autonomous capabilities, according to the Air Force, with the aim of enabling data sharing and interoperability in combined operations.
The Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme covers uncrewed aircraft intended to operate alongside crewed fighters, carrying weapons or sensors at lower cost than a manned platform. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems builds the YFQ-42A, derived from its earlier XQ-67A, while the YFQ-44A comes from Anduril Industries. Both were selected for the first increment of the programme in April 2024, and the Air Force has said the effort has moved from concept to flight testing in under two years.
Creech, roughly 45 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has been the centre of Air Force remotely piloted aircraft operations for two decades and hosts the 432nd Wing alongside its MQ-9 Reaper fleet. The Experimental Operations Unit was established at nearby Nellis Air Force Base to work the employment concepts, crew training and sustainment questions surrounding the new aircraft in parallel with the flight test programme.
