Until now, Anduril’s YFQ-44A Fury has been an air-to-air aircraft. It carries AIM-120 AMRAAMs, it flies alongside crewed fighters, and in July it became the first American collaborative combat aircraft to fire a missile in anger at a test range.
At the Air, Space and Cyber conference this week the company showed something different: the same airframe, on the ground, fitted with bombs.
Nothing has been dropped yet. This is a fit check — stores hung on the aircraft to confirm they physically go where the drawings say. But it is the step that comes before captive carry, which comes before live release, and it signals that the Air Force does not intend Fury to be a missile truck that only shoots at other aircraft.
Datos rápidos
Aeronave: Anduril YFQ-44A Fury, one of two US Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft Increment 1 designs
Qué pasó: ground fit checks with a range of air-to-ground stores, revealed at AFA Air, Space & Cyber, September 2026
Weapons shown: guided bombs, low-cost cruise missiles and rocket pods, on two external stations
Estado: fit check only. No captive-carry or live-release testing of air-to-ground weapons has been reported
Existing armament: AIM-120 AMRAAM. First live launch 15 July 2026 from Edwards AFB over the Mojave
Competitor: General Atomics YFQ-42A, the other Increment 1 aircraft
Programme context: the Air Force has said it wants roughly 500 CCAs fielded by 2032
The July Shot Was the Real Milestone
The air-to-ground fit check only makes sense against what happened two months earlier. On 15 July the YFQ-44A launched an AMRAAM from Edwards Air Force Base against a simulated target over the Mojave — the first live weapons release by an American CCA.
What made it significant was not the missile leaving the rail. It was everything around it.
A target track arriving from somewhere else, an operator assigning it to an aircraft he cannot see, and the aircraft executing. That is the whole proposition of collaborative combat aircraft compressed into one sortie. The missile is almost incidental.
Bombs Change What the Aircraft Is For
An air-to-air CCA is a magazine. It flies ahead of an F-35 or an F-22, carries missiles the crewed fighter cannot fit, and takes the risk of being the closest thing to the threat.
A CCA with guided bombs, cheap cruise missiles and rocket pods is something else: an attack aircraft you can afford to lose. Rocket pods in particular are a striking inclusion, because they are a short-range, look-the-target-in-the-eye weapon. You do not fit rocket pods to an aircraft you expect to keep.
That mix — expensive AMRAAMs at one end, rocket pods at the other — suggests the Air Force is still deciding what Fury is. Which is reasonable, since the first Fury flew only on 31 October 2025, from Southern California Logistics Airport at Victorville.
The Caveat Worth Keeping
A fit check is a low bar. It proves the pylon geometry works and nothing fouls. It does not prove separation, it does not prove the aircraft can hit anything with these weapons, and it does not prove the software can run an air-to-ground kill chain the way it ran the air-to-air one in July.
Anduril describes this as early work, and that framing is theirs, not a sceptic’s. Treat the photographs as a statement of intent rather than a capability.
Sources: FlightGlobal (Ryan Finnerty, 15 September 2026); Anduril Industries statements; US Air Force.
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