The First Ohio-Built Fury Rolls Off the Line, and the Collaborative Combat Aircraft Race Between Anduril and General Atomics Gets Real

SUMMARY: The first Ohio-built Anduril Fury has rolled off the line as General Atomics starts building its YFQ-42A, pushing the Air Force’s CCA program into production.

The U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program has crossed from prototype into early production. As of late July 2026, the first Ohio-built Fury has rolled off Anduril’s production line, and General Atomics has begun manufacturing its competing YFQ-42A at nearly the same moment. Two fighter-class, uncrewed aircraft are now being cut in metal on real production lines - no longer concept slides, but industrial reality.

What Just Happened With the CCA Program

Anduril has produced the first YFQ-44A “Fury” at its new Ohio manufacturing facility - a plant purpose-built to turn out these aircraft in volume. You don’t stand up a factory like that to build a single airplane.

Simultaneously, General Atomics has moved its YFQ-42A into manufacturing. Both aircraft have already been through flight testing, and both are now in early production. This is the first increment of the CCA program, so the competition between the two is genuinely underway.

What Is a Collaborative Combat Aircraft?

For decades, airpower meant one expensive fighter with one highly trained pilot inside carrying the fight. Aircraft like the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning are extraordinary - and extraordinarily expensive, with limited numbers and limited qualified pilots.

The CCA concept flips part of that equation. Instead of a lone crewed fighter, you pair it with a group of uncrewed, jet-powered, fighter-sized aircraft that fly formation alongside it and take direction from the crewed jet. These are not quadcopters or slow-orbiting Reapers - they are designed to fly with the fight.

The Air Force calls this the “loyal wingman” model. The crewed pilot becomes a mission quarterback; the CCAs are the receivers. Some carry extra missiles, some carry sensors, and some are built to fly ahead into dangerous airspace and absorb the risk a human shouldn’t.

Why the Air Force Is Pushing So Hard: Cost and Mass

A modern crewed fighter can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars once everything is counted. The whole promise of the CCA is that it comes dramatically cheaper - the Air Force has floated a target in the low tens of millions per aircraft, with some figures pointing to under $30 million a copy.

That’s not cheap in absolute terms, but against a fifth-generation crewed fighter it’s a bargain - and because it’s cheaper, you can build many. Air Force leadership calls this “affordable mass.”

The strategic problem behind it: American airpower has long bet on quality over quantity, fielding a small number of exquisite airplanes. But a small fleet is fragile. Every aircraft lost is hard to replace, and every pilot lost is impossible to replace quickly. Against an adversary with a large, modern air force, numbers matter again.

Who Won: Two Very Different Companies

The Air Force ran the first increment as a competition. Several companies pitched designs; two were picked to build flying prototypes. What surprised longtime observers is that neither winner was a traditional defense giant.

General Atomics took one slot. The maker of the Predator and Reaper knows uncrewed flight cold. Its entry carries the designation YFQ-42A.

Anduril took the other - and this is the one that turned heads. A newer technology company built on software and autonomy rather than decades of airframe production, Anduril’s pitch is that it can build faster and cheaper, more like a consumer product. Its aircraft is the YFQ-44A, known as Fury. Notably, Fury did not begin as an Air Force program - Anduril developed the base airplane on its own, then adapted it.

Why the “YFQ” Designation Is a Small Piece of History

In military designation language, the leading Y means the aircraft is a prototype or test article. The F stands for fighter. The Q marks it as uncrewed.

Putting the Q for uncrewed directly next to the F for fighter is new - we have not had fighter-designated aircraft carrying a Q before. The designation itself signals how much the ground is shifting.

Why This Matters for Pilots

You might fly a Cessna 172 or a Piper on weekends and wonder what a fighter-drone program has to do with you. Three things.

Workforce. Programs like this pull thousands of engineers, technicians, and skilled trades into aviation manufacturing. The Ohio plant hires locally, and when defense aviation booms it lifts the whole ecosystem - suppliers, machine shops, and training pipelines. General aviation shares that foundation.

Autonomy and airspace. Everything the military learns about flying uncrewed jets in formation - machines making flight decisions, sensing and avoiding - eventually seeps into the civilian world. The rules and software that let a CCA fly safely alongside a crewed fighter are cousins of the rules that will someday govern uncrewed traffic in the National Airspace System.

To be clear: a military CCA operates under military authority, on military ranges, in military-controlled airspace. The FAA is not certifying these as civil aircraft, and none of this changes how you fly tomorrow morning. This matters for the longer arc - one that bends toward more automation in the cockpit and more uncrewed traffic over the coming decades.

Culture. For as long as fighters have existed, the fighter has been defined by the person inside it. The CCA program quietly proposes a future where the most numerous combat aircraft in the fleet have nobody aboard. The crewed pilot doesn’t disappear - he or she moves up a level, from flying one airplane to directing a formation of them. For a young person dreaming of flying fighters, the job in fifteen years may look very different: not smaller, not less important, but different.

What Comes Next

Both the YFQ-42A and the YFQ-44A Fury have flown and are now in early production. The Air Force still has to finish testing, refine the autonomy, prove out how these aircraft team with crewed fighters in realistic conditions, and decide how many to buy and in what mix.

This round is called Increment One deliberately. An Increment Two is expected, with the door open to different companies and designs - the model is built to keep competition alive rather than lock in a single winner for thirty years. The next major milestone will be these aircraft teaming with crewed fighters in real exercises.

Key Takeaways

The first Ohio-built Anduril Fury (YFQ-44A) has rolled off the production line, and General Atomics has begun manufacturing the YFQ-42A - both as of late July 2026.
The Air Force’s CCA program has moved from prototype to early production, with both competitors now cutting metal.
CCAs are uncrewed, fighter-sized jets that fly as “loyal wingmen,” targeting a cost of roughly under $30 million each to deliver “affordable mass.”
The two winners - drone veteran General Atomics and software-first newcomer Anduril - signal the Air Force’s deliberate push to field combat aircraft in years rather than decades.
There’s no immediate change for general aviation, but the autonomy and airspace lessons will shape how uncrewed aircraft eventually share the National Airspace System.

Reporting on the first Ohio-built Fury and General Atomics beginning manufacturing on the YFQ-42A comes from AVweb.