Fury (YFQ-44A)

Fury is an autonomous jet-powered combat aircraft built by Anduril Industries for the United States Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme, the service’s effort to field uncrewed fighters that fly alongside crewed platforms like the F-35 and the future F-47. The airframe originated at Blue Force Technologies, a North Carolina aerospace start-up that Anduril acquired in September 2023; the Air Force assigned it the designation YFQ-44A in early 2025, making it one of the first uncrewed fighter aircraft to receive a fighter-series designation in the US military’s nomenclature system.

The aircraft is a high-performance, runway-independent jet sized below a manned fighter but above the typical attritable target drone. It is powered by a single Williams International FJ44-4M turbofan, the same family of engines used in light business jets, which gives it transonic speed and the range needed to escort manned strike packages deep into contested airspace. Autonomy is provided by Anduril’s Lattice software stack, the same mission-management layer that runs the company’s ground-based counter-drone systems and its Dive-LD undersea vehicle. Lattice handles sensor fusion, tactical decision-making, and coordination with crewed aircraft, so the operator in the cockpit of an accompanying F-35 or F-22 issues mission-level commands rather than flying the platform stick-and-rudder. The internal payload bay is sized for air-to-air missiles, and the airframe is designed for low-observable shaping, though detailed signature figures remain classified.

The US Air Force chose Anduril and General Atomics in April 2024 as the two Increment 1 vendors for the CCA programme, eliminating bids from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. The service has said it wants at least 1,000 CCAs across multiple increments, with a unit cost target of roughly a third of an F-35. First flight of the YFQ-44A took place on 31 October 2025 at Victorville, California, with the aircraft executing its mission plan semi-autonomously while an operator supervised. In June 2026 the Air Force chose to take both the YFQ-44A and General Atomics’ YFQ-42A into initial production rather than down-selecting to one, targeting roughly 150 aircraft by 2030 with an initial operational capability before the end of the decade. Australia’s air force has expressed interest in the wider CCA concept, though no foreign sale has been announced.

Fury sits at the centre of the Pentagon’s bet that future air combat will be conducted by mixed formations of crewed and uncrewed platforms, with the uncrewed aircraft absorbing the highest-risk missions. It competes most directly with General Atomics’ YFQ-42A, derived from that company’s XQ-67A demonstrator, and more loosely with Boeing’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat, which is being developed for the Royal Australian Air Force on a parallel timeline.