Anduril Fury Enters USAF Tests

The U.S. Air Force has begun hands-on testing with Anduril’s YFQ-44A at Edwards Air Force Base, putting service operators in the loop as the drone moves from development into operational experiments. (defensenews.com) The sorties were run by the Experimental Operations Unit, an Air Combat Command organization stood up to figure out how uncrewed aircraft can work with human pilots in real missions. The 412th Test Wing at Edwards supported the exercise. (defensenews.com) The aircraft in this test is the YFQ-44A, the Air Force designation for Anduril’s Fury design. The service announced the YFQ-44A name in March 2025 alongside General Atomics’ YFQ-42A, the two prototypes in the first Collaborative Combat Aircraft competition. (af.mil) A collaborative combat aircraft is meant to fly with crewed fighters as a lower-cost robotic wingman, carrying sensors, weapons, or other mission gear while taking on some of the risk. The Air Force says the program is intended to expand crewed-uncrewed teaming and add mass to future air combat formations. (af.mil) This month’s exercise was not just a company demo flight. Air Force operators used the aircraft to start building tactics, techniques and procedures — the practical playbook for how pilots and controllers would actually use these drones. (aviationweek.com) That marks a change from the program’s earlier phase. In April 2025, the Department of the Air Force said it was still in ground testing on propulsion, avionics, autonomy integration and ground-control interfaces before broader flight testing. (af.mil) Anduril said the YFQ-44A first flew in late 2025, 556 days after contract award, and said the latest exercise came less than two years after the prototype contract and about six months after first flight. The company also said the aircraft flew from Edwards back to its Southern California test site after the event. (anduril.com, anduril.com) The software stack is a big part of the story. Anduril said in March 2026 that the YFQ-44A had flown with mission-autonomy software from Anduril and Shield AI through test points meant to reflect future mission concepts. (anduril.com) The Air Force is also trying to avoid locking these aircraft to one software provider. Edwards said in February 2026 that the government’s Autonomous Government Reference Architecture, or A-GRA, was being integrated by mission-autonomy vendors on both the YFQ-42 and YFQ-44. (edwards.af.mil) Production planning is already moving in parallel with testing. Anduril said in February 2026 that its new Arsenal-1 factory in Ohio would build the YFQ-44A as its first product, tying the flight-test campaign to a larger push for faster, higher-volume manufacturing. (anduril.com) What comes next is more operator testing, more software integration and a longer effort to decide how many of these aircraft the Air Force wants and what jobs they should do first. The current flights at Edwards are where that doctrine starts getting written. (defensenews.com, anduril.com)