Walk the halls at Farnborough this week and you will trip over robot aeroplanes. Anduril unveiled a tiltrotor on Monday morning. BAE and Lockheed unveiled a jammer an hour or two later. Boeing parked an Australian one on the static line. General Atomics brought its own. Turkey and Italy spent the spring flying theirs together.
They are all described, by somebody, as a “loyal wingman”. Most of them are not the same thing at all, and the differences matter more than the marketing.
Here is what is actually flying, what each one is for, and why every air force on earth suddenly wants one.
Datos rápidos
| ¿Por qué ahora? | Two decades of rising fighter costs met a war in Ukraine that showed cheap mass can beat expensive quality |
| The US programme | Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) Increment One — a two-horse race between General Atomics’ YFQ-42A and Anduril’s YFQ-44A Fury |
| First live shot | A YFQ-44A fired an AIM-120 AMRAAM in a test this month — the first live air-to-air weapon released by a US autonomous wingman |
| Australia | Boeing’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat, flying since 2021 and the most operationally mature of the lot |
| New this week | Anduril’s Thunder tiltrotor and the BAE–Lockheed Blizzard, both revealed at Farnborough on 20 July 2026 |
| Europe | GCAP and FCAS both assume uncrewed adjuncts. Britain wants a UK system flying before 2030 |
| The common thread | Open architecture, so weapons and sensors can be added in months rather than years |
Three different things wearing one name
The category has become sloppy. It is worth separating into three tiers, because they cost different amounts, do different jobs and answer to different requirements.
Collaborative combat aircraft are the big ones: jet-powered, fighter-sized, expected to come home. The YFQ-42A, the YFQ-44A Fury and the MQ-28 Ghost Bat live here. They carry air-to-air missiles internally, fly alongside F-35 or F-15EXs, and are meant to survive multiple sorties. They are not cheap — the US Air Force has asked for close to a billion dollars to buy its first batch in 2027 — but they are a fraction of a crewed fighter.
Air-launched effects are the small ones, and Blizzard is the example unveiled this week. At around 400 pounds it is closer to a cruise missile than an aircraft. It is carried, released and largely spent, and its job is to jam, decoy or suppress air defences so that something more valuable can get through. Nobody expects to recover it.
Rotary-wing teaming is the newest tier and the one Anduril opened on Monday. Thunder is a tiltrotor built to work at helicopter altitude with Apaches and the US Army's forthcoming MV-75, in the low and cluttered air where a runway-dependent jet is no use.
What Ukraine taught everybody
The intellectual shift behind all of this happened in the last four years, and Anduril's president was explicit about it at Farnborough.
The lesson is not that drones beat aircraft. It is that quantity has a quality of its own, and that Western air forces had spent thirty years optimising for exactly the opposite — smaller numbers of exquisite, irreplaceable machines flown by pilots who take a decade to train.
An air force with 150 fighters cannot afford to lose ten. An air force with 150 fighters and 400 expendable robot escorts can afford to lose quite a lot of the escorts.
The part that is genuinely hard
Building the airframe is not the difficult bit. Small jet-powered aircraft are a solved problem. Two things are not.
The first is autonomy that works in a fight. Not autopilot — the ability to be told an objective and work out the flying. Anduril's Shane Arnott drew the distinction that the whole field now turns on: commanding these systems rather than controlling them. A Reaper needs somebody flying it. A CCA is supposed to need somebody deciding what it should achieve.
The second is integration speed, and it is why every company at this show says “open architecture” roughly once a minute.
Seven months to put a new missile on an aircraft is remarkable. On a conventional fighter the same job runs to years of test campaigns, software drops and certification. If these aircraft are going to be updated constantly and produced cheaply, that gap is the entire business case.
Who is actually ahead
On maturity, Australia. The MQ-28 has been flying since 2021, has fired a live AMRAAM in a teamed engagement with an E-7A and a Super Hornet, has operated from California, and has flown in a multinational exercise alongside American fighters. Nothing else in the category has that record.
On money and scale, the United States. The CCA programme has two flying competitors, a live missile shot this month, and a budget line to buy the first operational aircraft in 2027.
On breadth of ideas, arguably Europe and Turkey. The Kizilelma has flown teamed with an Italian M-346 under Baykar and Leonardo's K-SWARM programme. GCAP and FCAS both assume uncrewed adjuncts from the outset. Britain has said it wants a domestic system in the air before 2030 and has three separate industry pitches circling that requirement.
What nobody has yet is an operational squadron. Every aircraft named here is in test, and every date attached to them is a target rather than a delivery.
Which is worth remembering while walking the halls this week. What is on display at Farnborough is not the future of air combat arriving. It is six or seven competing bets about what that future looks like, made by companies who will not all turn out to be right.
Sources: DefenseScoop, Aviation Week, The Aviationist, Breaking Defense, FlightGlobal, Janes, Boeing.
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