U.S. Air Force tests YFQ-44A ‘fighter drone’ with minimal crew using laptop

The U.S. Air Force and Anduril Industries completed the first experimental testing of the YFQ-44A Collaborative Combat Aircraft with the Air Force’s newly stood-up Experimental Operations Unit last week, conducting a series of daily flight operations at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

The exercise marked the first time Air Force personnel — not Anduril employees — led end-to-end operations of the semi-autonomous combat aircraft, including launch, recovery, pre- and post-flight checks, weapons loading and unloading, and direct tasking of the air vehicle during taxi and flight.

The milestone arrived just six months after the YFQ-44A completed its first semi-autonomous flight, and less than two years after Anduril received the prototype contract award. For the exercise, the aircraft flew from Anduril’s Southern California test site to Edwards Air Force Base, where the Experimental Operations Unit assumed full operational control for the duration of the exercise before the YFQ-44A returned to the Southern California facility.

The Experimental Operations Unit — referred to as the EOU — is the Air Force organization specifically responsible for developing the doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures that will govern how Collaborative Combat Aircraft are integrated, deployed, and sustained ahead of future combat operations. Its involvement in live flight operations with the YFQ-44A represents the formal beginning of the handoff from contractor-led testing to Air Force-led experimentation.

Central to the exercise was Anduril’s Menace-T command, control, communications, and compute system, which served as the core ground element for all YFQ-44A flight operations. EOU operators used a ruggedized Menace-T laptop to upload mission plans, initiate autonomous taxi and takeoff, task the aircraft while airborne, and manage post-flight data ingestion and checks. The entire operational footprint fit into two Pelican cases and a laptop — a deliberate design outcome that allowed the EOU to conduct operations out of a simulated forward operating base without the infrastructure of a large established base.

Maintainers assigned to the EOU, working with only days of training, successfully turned the YFQ-44A between sorties throughout the exercise — a significant demonstration given that traditional unmanned aerial vehicles typically require substantially larger ground crews and more extensive training pipelines. Automated software checks were cited as a key factor in reducing manpower and training requirements, alongside the aircraft’s intentionally simplified hardware design.

The YFQ-44A is Anduril’s entry in the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which is designed to pair autonomous or semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft with crewed fighters in future combat operations. The concept envisions these aircraft operating as wingmen for manned jets — extending sensor reach, carrying weapons, absorbing risk, and complicating an adversary’s targeting picture. The Air Force has described the CCA program as a generational shift in how American airpower will be projected, with the goal of fielding a credible combat-ready capability by the end of the decade, faster than any major fighter aircraft program in more than 50 years.

A defining characteristic of the YFQ-44A’s development approach has been the decision to make all taxi and flight tests semi-autonomous from the outset. Anduril’s leadership has stated that front-loading autonomy — even at the cost of delaying some early milestones — was a deliberate bet intended to accelerate the program’s long-term trajectory. The EOU exercise, completed six months after first flight, was cited as evidence that the early investment in autonomous operations capability paid off: Air Force operators were able to run the aircraft with minimal training precisely because the autonomy architecture was mature from the program’s earliest stages.

The exercise also served as an initial test of the YFQ-44A’s compatibility with the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept, which calls for dispersing aircraft and personnel across multiple small, flexible locations to reduce vulnerability in contested environments. Because ACE operations by definition limit the logistics tail and infrastructure available at any given location, the CCA program has been designed from the ground up to function with a minimal equipment, manpower, and basing footprint. The EOU’s ability to sustain daily sorties out of a simulated forward operating base during the exercise was a direct validation of that design philosophy.

The lessons gathered during this first EOU exercise are expected to feed directly back into both future exercises and ongoing development of the aircraft itself. The Air Force and Anduril have indicated that additional exercises will continue to evaluate the YFQ-44A’s relevance to ACE concepts and generate the operational data needed to further refine CCA doctrine and workflows. The broader CCA program also involves Boeing, which is developing the YFQ-42A under a separate contract — making this a competitive prototype phase with two distinct aircraft vying to define the future of autonomous American airpower.