AURORA, Colo.—General Atomics says it’ll be ready to mass-produce its collaborative combat aircraft prototype after first flight this summer, its president said—soon after Air Force leaders debuted a new designation for such robot wingmen.
“With the factory we’ve got, we could easily go up to 12 to 18 a month—today. You have to ramp into that,” but the company could reach that rate “without buying a whole bunch of new buildings and capitalizing a bunch,” said General Atomics Aeronautical Systems president Dave Alexander.
The company—along with Anduril, the other competitor building “increment one” of the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program—are readying their drones ahead of first flight this summer. Afterward, the Air Force will decide whether to build one or both of the companies’ offerings.
“We’ve already built the prototype, and we’re building the productionized-airplane now. So right at first flight, we are leaning forward, and we’re going into production. We don’t have to redesign, we have to tool up, or any of that. It’s ready to go,” Alexander told Defense One on the sidelines of the AFA Warfare Symposium.
General Atomics’s CCA is a version of its Gambit family of aircraft that borrows much from its XQ-67 aircraft, which was developed through the Air Force’s secretive Off-Board Sensing Station program and flew last year.
In 2019, the company known for its Predator and Reaper drones reached a production peak of around eight and a half aircraft per month. Today, it’s down to about three and half per month, Alexander said, so the company will need to ready its 5-million-square-foot facility in California to mass-produce CCAs.
While General Atomics has the space needed, Alexander said they’re waiting on more funding before they finish building out the production lines. The CCA program is expected to fare well in future budget requests, as it was one of the programs exempted from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s 8% funding shift.
“We will lean forward and help bridge some of those gaps. We’re happy to see that we were exempt from that 8% but I think we need to lean forward more. And so we’re helping the customer bring, I would say speed to ramp, but more like speed to capability out there,” he said.
New designator
Earlier in the week, Air Force chief Gen. David Allvin announced new designations for its CCAs—naming General Atomics’ YFQ-42A and Anduril’s YFQ-44A. In the Air Force’s naming system, “F” stands for fighter, “Q” stands for drones, and “Y” stands for a production-representative aircraft, which will be dropped once production starts.
The novel mission designation is “maybe just symbolic” but it’s “telling the world that we are leaning into a new chapter of aerial warfare,” Allvin said during his keynote Monday.
The new “FQ” designator will “live forever,” Alexander said. “People will talk about that in 100 years. ‘Oh, remember when they used to have manned fighters?’”
