Anduril begins flight-testing its YFQ-44A CCA prototype

California-based Anduril Industries has announced that its YFQ-44A collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) began its flight-test programme on 31 October 2025.

The company provided little information about the actual test flights themselves, but declared in a press release, “Flight testing is where we prove to ourselves, to the Air Force, to our allies, and to our adversaries that these proclamations about game-changing technology go beyond words. They’re real, and they are taking to the skies today. The flight-testing process is where we prove that our aircraft meets the mark in terms of speed, manoeuvrability, autonomy, stealth, range, weapons systems integration, and more. As YFQ-44A climbs higher, we’re proving that it doesn’t merely look like a fighter, but that it performs like one.”

Anduril is testing its CCA prototype alongside a parallel effort by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc (GA-ASI). In April 2024 the US Air Force (USAF) awarded contracts to both companies to build production-representative CCA test articles. GA-ASI’s YFQ-42A CCA prototype made its first flight on 27 August 2025.

In future CCAs are intended to work alongside manned combat aircraft. They are designed to gain and maintain air superiority in highly contested environments through a focus on autonomy and affordable mass in what Anduril termed “a paradigm shift in how the United States will employ and project combat airpower”.

In announcing the initiation of flight-testing of its CCA prototype, Anduril emphasised the degree of autonomy it already has.

“YFQ-44A was not designed to be a remotely piloted aircraft, and that is not how we are operating it — from first flight and forever onward,” the company stated. “All of our taxi and flight tests have been and will continue to be semi-autonomous. This is a new age of air power; there is no operator with a stick and throttle flying the aircraft behind the scenes. Our aircraft is ushering in this new paradigm with incredible technical precision: it executes a mission plan on its own, manages flight control and throttle adjustment independent of human command, and returns to land at the push of a button, all under the watchful eye of an operator ‘on the loop’ but not in it.”

The company additional noted that it is building a five million foot square production facility for the YFQ-44A in Columbus, Ohio, called Arsenal-1 and that the company is on track to begin production of prototype CCAs at Arsenal-1 in the first half of 2026.

It us understood that under the first increment of its CCA programme the USAF could award production contracts to either one or both of the current vendors.