For the first time in history, the US Air Force has officially handed out a ‘Fighter’ designation to a drone, and the honour belongs to Anduril Industries’ YFQ-44A Fury. This jet-powered, AI-piloted beast earned its ‘F’ after proving it could handle everything from high-speed taxiing and takeoff to complex aerial manoeuvres—all without a human in the loop. No pilot in the cockpit, no one on the ground with a joystick; just a silicon brain pulling the Gs.
Revealed at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium, this milestone marks a tectonic shift in the future of dogfighting. Developed at breakneck speed—from a clean sheet to its first flight in just 556 days—the Fury recently stepped up its game with captive-carry flight tests, sporting an inert AIM-120 AMRAAM missile. It’s a world away from legacy programmes like the F-35, which has been stuck in development since the mid-90s and is currently staring down a lifecycle cost projected to soar past the £1.5 trillion ($2 trillion) mark.
While Anduril’s achievement is a massive win for the tech upstarts, they weren’t actually the first to get a Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) prototype off the ground. Their rivals at General Atomics saw their YFQ-42A ‘Dark Merlin’ take to the skies on 27 August 2025, beating the Fury’s maiden flight on 31 October 2025 by a couple of months. The two firms are now locked in a high-stakes ‘fly-off’ for a production contract expected to be signed in the 2026 fiscal year.
Why does this matter?
The ‘F’ designation isn’t just military window dressing; it’s a formal declaration that the era of autonomous air combat has arrived. These CCAs are designed to be the ultimate ’loyal wingmen’, flying into hostile airspace ahead of manned jets to scout, jam signals, and engage threats. They provide the kind of ‘affordable mass’ that traditional, eye-wateringly expensive fleets simply can’t match. For Anduril—a venture-backed disruptor now valued at over £23 billion ($30 billion)—this is more than a successful test; it’s a shot across the bows of the entire defence establishment. With a 5-million-square-foot factory already in the works to mass-produce these systems, Anduril is betting that the days of the traditional manned fighter are officially numbered.
