Two Californian companies announced this week that they are going to build an autonomous aircraft together. They did not say what it is, who it is for, what it costs, or when it flies. Ordinarily that would be a press release to ignore.

This one is worth a second look, because of how they intend to build it.

AEVEX Corp. and Divergent Technologies are pairing AEVEX’s unmanned systems work with Divergent’s manufacturing platform — a process that replaces cut metal tooling with 3D-printed metal structures, AI-assisted design and robots. It is the same system Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works used to go from a blank sheet to a flying drone in under a year.

The tooling problem

Building a new military aircraft has always been dominated by one thing that has nothing to do with aerodynamics: tooling. Before you can make the first airframe you have to make the machines that make the airframe — the dies, jigs and fixtures that hold everything in the right place. That takes years and enormous sums, and once it exists, changing the design becomes expensive enough that people stop wanting to.

DAPS attacks exactly that. Divergent prints metal structural nodes, uses AI-assisted design to optimise them, and has robots assemble the result. There is no hard tooling to amortise. A design change is a new print file.

What each side brings

AEVEX is not a start-up in the garage sense. It has delivered unmanned aircraft, ISR systems, electronic warfare equipment and unmanned surface vessels to national security customers, employs around 650 people across American manufacturing sites, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in April after years as a Madison Dearborn portfolio company.

Divergent brings the printers, and a considerable amount of momentum. It raised $290 million earlier this year at a $2.3 billion valuation, sits on the Air Force’s Eglin Wide Agile Acquisition Contract with its $46 billion ceiling, and is building a factory in Long Beach designed to house 64 metal printers and eventually turn out tens of thousands of missile airframes and warhead casings a year.

“Mass at the pace of need” is marketing language, but it points at the genuine argument. The two companies say early work will focus on adaptable airframe designs, faster integration and production methods that cut part counts and shorten development timelines.

The Replicator precedent

The reason to take this seriously is that DAPS has already produced an aircraft. In June, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works and Divergent revealed Replicator, a jet-powered drone with a 2.7-metre wingspan, additively manufactured and robotically assembled, taken from concept to first physical article in under twelve months. Lockheed had put $25 million into Divergent in 2024 to explore exactly this.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth saw it during a stop at Divergent’s facility on his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour of American defence manufacturers — a name that deliberately echoes Roosevelt’s Arsenal of Democracy, and tells you what the Pentagon thinks the problem is.

Context on the wider push for cheap, mass-produced munitions and unmanned aircraft.

The unanswered questions are the important ones. Nobody has said what this aircraft is, how big it is, whether anyone has ordered it, or when it might fly. Announcements like this are cheap. Airframes are not.

But the direction of travel across American defence aviation right now is unmistakable: fewer exquisite things, more cheap ones, produced faster. If printing them works, the companies that own the printers are going to matter a great deal.

Sources: The Defence Blog, AEVEX Corp., Divergent Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Axios.