An MQ-20 drone just teamed up with an F-22 for mock combat missions

A General Atomics MQ-20 drone took orders from an F-22 pilot during a recent mock mission that demonstrated robot-wingman concepts, company officials said in a Monday statement.

During a test flight earlier this month at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the pilot used Autonodyne’s Bashi pilot-vehicle interface to order the autonomous drone to “execute tactical maneuvers,” move waypoints, conduct combat patrols, and take on “threat engagement tasks,” the statement said. 

“We appreciate the flawless execution of this mission using the government’s advanced autonomous systems,” said GA-ASI President David R. Alexander. “This demo featured the integration of mission elements and the ability of autonomy to utilize onboard sensors to make independent decisions and execute commands from the F-22.”

The flight followed a November demo in which an F-22 pilot used a tablet to control an MQ-20 using L3Harris datalinks and software radios with Lockheed Martin’s open radio architectures.

General Atomics, Anduril, and Northrop Grumman are all in the running to build the Air Force’s first collaborative combat aircraft. Earlier this month, the service announced that it had used the government-owned Autonomy Government Reference Architecture, or A-GRA, to integrate RTX Collins software aboard General Atomics’ YFQ-42 CCA aircraft and Shield AI’s technology on Anduril’s YFQ-44 CCA. 

General Atomics has since said it had logged another semi-autonomous flight on its YFQ-42 drone wingman with RTX Collins’ autonomy software onboard. Anduril and Shield AI, as of last week, had not had a joint CCA flight together. Northrop plans a first flight for its drone wingman this year.

In a separate Monday statement, General Atomics said it had given the name “Dark Merlin” to the YFQ-42—a reference, it said, to deadly falcons and “the wizardry of Merlin from Arthurian legend.”

Anduril, whose company takes its name from a sword from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of The Rings” fantasy books, calls its CCA offering “Fury”—the original name given to the aircraft by Blue Force Technologies, which was acquired by Anduril in 2023. Northrop’s “Project Talon” CCA is reportedly a nod to the Air Force’s T-38 trainer.

“Dark merlins are hunting machines, built for speed and aerodynamics,” Alexander said in an emailed statement. “They harass other falcons for fun, and they eat what they kill. The name sums up our new uncrewed fighter perfectly.”