“It will be another plane but we will be leveraging similar parts, design principles”, said Jason Levin, the senior vice president of Air Dominance and Strike at Anduril, of how an unmanned combat jet in the Navy can borrow the work of the company in the Air Force without being turned into Navy.
The U.S. Navy is focused on that difference, which is at the heart of its quest to bring on board an armed and carrier capable Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) on the flight deck. It is not a new drone of an objective. It is a novel type of aircraft that is designed to absorb cat launches and arrested recoveries, survive in the rough geometry of deck spotting, and play a significant part in addition to the F-35C and F/A-18E/F as threats increase range and survivability margin.
The program has already resorted to aspirational slides. The Navy has contracted General Atomics, Boeing, Anduril and Northrop Grumman to do conceptual design and Lockheed Martin is developing a common control system that is designed to standardize the operation of sailors and aviators across multiple uncrewed aircraft during missions. The shorthand of the service itself, the uncrewed, modular, interoperable, interchangeable and versatile platforms, is a telegram of taste in favor of aircraft which can be changed, updated, and assigned without the protracted, bespoke tails to sustainment which typify traditional fighter aircraft.
The first engineering filter is carrier suitability which is unforgiving. The Navy CCA has to be built in such a way that it can withstand the launch and recovery loads, have strong landing gears, withstand corrosion and provide stable approaches over the turbulent air behind a ship in motion. It also needs to be safely managed in small deck areas that impose the designers towards compact planforms and, in many cases, wing-folding. Such decisions spill into the operations: the ability to sortie more and a faster reconfiguration of missions can be made through smaller aircraft, endurance, payload, and signature control trade offs can be made by larger, more resilient shapes.
The second filter is autonomy–it is less noticeable, and more decisive.
Later in 2025, the Navy explored autonomous teaming in a Live Virtual Constructive environment with BQM-177A targets being controlled using Shield AI autonomy software. A few years later, the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division utilized the Joint Simulation Environment to put F-35 pilots on the loop, and operated a number of uncrewed aircraft under control via tablet-like displays to run through simulated missions involving the use of precision-guided missiles. Combined, those incidences brought the actual issue into the limelight: scalable human-machine workflows that would allow a small crew to control multiple airplanes under stress, not only fly a single drone high and fly on a clean range.
The competing pitches of industry show various ways to that result. The concept of modularity and producibility that General Atomics is focusing on is its Gambit family, which is based on a shared core that is designed to span about 70 percent of the aircraft cost in the variants. The concept is a standardized baseline – landing gear, avionics, chassis and other key systems – and interchangeable engines, wings, and fuselage to tune the range, speed, payload or signature characteristics with Navy requirements becoming tighter.
Anduril is also stressing on software velocity, postulating that a Navy airplane can avionics and use elements, avionics philosophy, and task-based autonomy architecture that an Air Force initiative has tried to develop without trying to transform the YFQ-44A into a carrier jet. The company has cited its condensed rate of development, such as the fact that Fury transitioned to clean sheet to first flight in approximately 500 days, as an indication of future rate of the maturing of a Navy-specific design should the concept of operations become available.
Since what becomes hard to one as requirement will be, probably, the consideration of a trade incapable of being engineered out: the extent to which the aircraft can be made expendable. One of the industrial sources put it in this way, Is it something that you can roll out and lose in battle or something where you must trade off the survivability of the mission. It is even more acute at sea, in which the deck area defines the number of aircraft that can board and the maintenance levels that can restrict the frequency with which a niche fleet is actually flown.
Simultaneously, parallel activities outside the carrier are also giving grain to Navy CCA thinking. One solicitation of a Defense Innovation Unit outlines a reusable strike drone design, to be used on ships of limited flight deck size, with a minimum one-way, no-reserve range of 1,400 nautical miles and sufficient autonomy to operate under jamming and GPS denial. Although that work addresses other launch platforms, it confirms the same movement of flow: the heavier is made reusable, the less reusable are the one-shot inventories, and the autonomy that graciously fails when the network refuses to cooperate.
In the case of carrier air wings, the airframe is not the disruptive component. The result is the carrier-grade mechanical design, interoperable control, and self-sufficiency robust enough to enable a manned mission commander to control multiple uncrewed jets and make them work with each other without making the cockpit look like a management control board.
