The US Air Force have designated the first two prototypes of uncrewed fighter aircraft for the first time in the service’s history according to a statement on 3 March 2025.

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and Anduril have put forward their own models to compete for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) project within the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) programme.

Both CCAs have been designated respectively: YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A. These characters represent the systems as protoype (Y) fighters (F) that are uncrewed (Q), discerned by a unique number, followed by an indication that each system is in its first iteration (A).

The Air Force aim to procure 1,000 CCAs – a number derived by projecting the use of two systems for each of the 500 crewed fighters (200 sixth-generation platforms and 300 F-35s).

While designation is standard practice at this stage in platform development, the Air Force Chief of Staff, General David Allvin, observed that the milestone demonstrates the service “leaning into a new chapter of aerial warfare.”

CCAs offer attritable mass while collaborating with, and taking direction from, human pilots in crewed aircraft. They will serve to expand the fighter fleet and protect human pilots at a lower cost than current fighter jets. Driven by artificial intelligence software, these ‘loyal wingman’ will potentially fly alone or in small groups, and possibly equipped for a variety of missions.

“They were only on paper less than a couple of years ago,” General Allvin alluded. Though, the Department of Defense committed to the crewed-uncrewed teaming concept a decade ago, through various precursor projects, prompted by the need to break the cost growth of traditional aircraft. Now, the CCAs “are going to be ready to fly this summer,” Allvin confirmed.

This past year, however, the service has taken a step back from the design of the crewed sixth-generation fighter project at the centre of the NGAD programme to reaffirm certain aspects, according to Lieutenant General David Tabor, Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs, in October last year:

“The reality is that the NGAD platform was conceived in about 2018 and as it has developed, there have been some changes, but certainly the environment has changed greatly, the assumption has changed greatly. So it’s imperative for us to reassess what that looks like, what is incorporated on it.”