General Atomics using MQ-20 for air-to-air training project

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) has been awarded a £76 million ($98 million) contract to lead Project Red 5.

The effort, overseen by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defence (OUSD) and the Test Resource Management Centre (TRMC), aims to prototype advanced autonomous air-to-air capabilities to enhance adversary air training profiles.

Under this contract, GA-ASI will deploy two MQ-20 Avenger Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and provide mission autonomy software. This software will integrate advanced sensors, data links, and other mission systems to enable autonomous air-to-air missions. These missions will allow current fourth and fifth-generation Blue Force fighters to train against autonomous “red air” surrogate platforms.

“GA-ASI has continued to invest and deploy our open architecture autonomy ecosystem integrated with best-of-breed mission systems,” said Jeff Hettick, GA-ASI Vice President for Agile Mission Systems.

“We are thrilled to partner with TRMC to bring these capabilities that create operationally relevant Red Air surrogates and significantly improve Blue Force mission success in realistic air-to-air training scenarios.”

Project Red 5 is intended to complement GA-ASI’s ongoing work on Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) initiatives. These include autonomy and mission system tests on MQ-20 Avengers, the development of the XQ-67A for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), and prototype production and flight testing for the U.S. Air Force Life Cycle Management Centre’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) programme.

The contract highlights GA-ASI’s role in developing autonomous systems and improving training capabilities for the U.S. military, offering enhanced and realistic training scenarios to support mission success.

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