Somewhere on a taxiway at a Northrop Grumman test facility, something remarkable happened last week — and nobody was in the cockpit. The YFQ-48A Talon Blue, Northrop Grumman’s contender for the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program, completed a series of fully autonomous taxi tests, rolling under its own power and its own digital brain without a human touching a single control. The company announced the milestone via social media on May 18, and while a drone taxiing might not sound like front-page news, in the world of autonomous combat aviation, this is the starting gun.

The test marks a critical step on the path to first flight for the Talon Blue, which is racing neck-and-neck against Anduril Industries’ Fury drone for the right to become the Air Force’s first mass-produced autonomous wingman. The CCA program — one of the Pentagon’s highest-priority acquisition efforts — envisions fleets of relatively cheap, AI-piloted drones flying alongside crewed fighters like the F-35, absorbing risk, carrying weapons, and fundamentally changing the math of aerial combat.

The CCA Race: Two Philosophies, One Prize

The competition between Northrop Grumman and Anduril could not be a more fascinating study in contrasts. Northrop brings eight decades of experience building America’s most exotic flying machines — the B-2 Spirit, the B-21 Raider, the X-47B. They know how to build stealthy, survivable platforms that can penetrate the most defended airspace on Earth. The Talon Blue likely draws heavily on that institutional knowledge, although details about the airframe remain classified behind a wall of black programs.

The stakes are enormous. The Air Force wants to buy at least 1,000 CCAs over the next decade, at a unit cost of roughly one-third the price of an F-35 — somewhere in the $25 to $30 million range. For Northrop Grumman, winning CCA would be transformative, adding a major new production line alongside the B-21 Raider. For Anduril, it would be the validation that Silicon Valley can play in the big leagues of defence manufacturing. For the Air Force, it could be the single most important acquisition decision since the F-35 itself.

Sources: Northrop Grumman social media channels (May 18, 2026); U.S. Air Force CCA Program Office; Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs; Congressional Research Service.