At ILA Berlin, Airbus pulled the covers off a long, dark shape with knife-thin wings and no cockpit — and gave Europe its clearest look yet at the robot fighter it wants to send to war alongside its pilots.

The aircraft is the U-760 Ravenstorm, an uncrewed collaborative combat aircraft — a “loyal wingman” built to fly beside crewed jets such as the Eurofighter Typhoon, carry weapons and sensors into places a pilot would rather not go, and take orders from the cockpit next door. It is Airbus’s bid to matter in a contest the Americans and Chinese are already sprinting through.

And it is not a one-off. Ravenstorm sits at the centre of a whole family of drones Airbus laid out in Berlin — a deliberate statement that Europe intends to build its own uncrewed air power rather than buy it.

A wingman that never gets tired

At 13 metres long with a 10-metre wingspan, Ravenstorm is roughly the size of a light fighter — but with no pilot to protect, no life support and no ejection seat, every kilogram can go toward fuel, sensors and weapons. Airbus wants it to carry long-range air-to-air missiles, strike ground targets with precision munitions, hunt and jam enemy air defences, and wage electronic warfare, all while a human in a nearby jet keeps command.

The division of labour is the whole point. The drone’s mission systems and artificial intelligence fly the routine and chew through sensor data; the pilot makes the decisions that matter. It is the same crewed–uncrewed teaming logic driving America’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft and China’s loyal-wingman experiments — only now with a European accent.

A portfolio, not a prototype

Ravenstorm did not arrive alone. In Berlin, Airbus presented a consolidated portfolio of European drones built around open architectures: the U-740 Valkyrie, a Europeanised version of the American Kratos XQ-58A; the U-145, an uncrewed derivative of the H145 helicopter; and the U-950 Eurodrone, the continent’s big medium-altitude surveillance platform. Airbus traces the lineage of the combat drones back two decades, to its stealthy Barracuda demonstrator.

The message is sovereignty. As Europe pours money into next-generation air power — from the Franco-German-Spanish FCAS to the British-Italian-Japanese GCAP — Airbus is arguing that the drones flying alongside those future fighters should be designed and built on the continent, not imported.

The race Europe cannot sit out

Whether Ravenstorm flies on schedule is another question. Airbus is targeting operational readiness around 2032, and the gap between a polished airshow model and a combat-ready aircraft has swallowed many promising European programmes before. But the direction is set: the next air war will be fought by pilots and their robots together, and Europe has decided it wants to build the robots itself.

Sources: Janes; The War Zone; The Defense Post; Airbus Defence and Space.