The FQ-42 Vengeance and FQ-44 Fury, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft Names Troy Meink Announced, and What Autonomous Wingmen Mean for the Pilots Who Will Fly Alongside Them

The United States Air Force has officially named its two Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink announced at the Air and Space Forces Association conference that the FQ-42 will carry the name Vengeance, built by General Atomics, and the FQ-44 will be called Fury, built by Anduril Industries. The announcement marks a formal transition from prototype evaluation to operational identity for aircraft designed to fly as autonomous wingmen alongside crewed fighters.

What Are the FQ-42 Vengeance and FQ-44 Fury?

The Vengeance and the Fury are part of the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program - a class of uncrewed aircraft built to fly alongside crewed fighters, not replace them. These aircraft are designed to carry weapons, suppress threats, collect targeting data, and absorb adversary attention in high-threat environments.

General Atomics, the company behind the Predator and Reaper systems that have logged millions of flight hours over two decades of real-world operations, developed the FQ-42 Vengeance. Anduril Industries, a defense technology company founded in 2017 with a focus on autonomous systems and artificial intelligence applied to national security, developed the FQ-44 Fury. The Air Force selected both designs in 2024 to advance into the next phase of the program.

What the Dropped “Y” Designation Means

Both aircraft previously carried prototype designations: the YFQ-42A and the YFQ-44A. In military aircraft designation language, the “Y” prefix indicates a prototype - a test article under evaluation, not yet committed to production. The YF-22 and YF-23 competed for the Air Force’s advanced tactical fighter contract in the early 1990s. The YF-22 won and became the F-22 Raptor. The Y prefix signals a program being figured out; dropping it signals a program that has crossed a line.

Secretary Meink’s announcement dropped the Y. These are now the FQ-42 and FQ-44, carrying identities they will hold into their operational lives.

What the FQ Designation Represents

The FQ designation is new ground for U.S. military aviation. Standard aircraft prefixes are familiar: F for fighter, B for bomber, C for cargo, A for attack, U for utility. The Q designation has historically applied to uncrewed aircraft, tracing back to early target drone programs. Combining F and Q produces something the Air Force has not fielded before: a fighter-class uncrewed aircraft.

This is not a surveillance platform loitering at altitude. It is not a reconnaissance asset waiting for a ground team to review a video feed. The Vengeance and the Fury are combat systems designed to operate where the threat is and deliver effects in contested airspace.

The History Behind the Names “Vengeance” and “Fury”

These names were not chosen casually. Both carry weight from aviation history.

The Vultee Vengeance was a dive bomber flown by the British Royal Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force during the early years of World War II. It flew over Burma and the Pacific theater performing close air support and precision attack work. It wasn’t a headline aircraft, but it was present, effective, and the name carried hard intent.

The Fury has its own lineage. The Hawker Fury was a British biplane fighter of the 1930s, among the fastest aircraft in RAF service before the monoplane era reshaped the design world. Later, the North American FJ Fury was the U.S. Navy’s carrier-based adaptation of what became the F-86 Sabre. The name has historically attached to aircraft that were fast, aggressive, and purpose-built for the fight.

When the Air Force assigns names like these, it is communicating intent - to the pilots who will fly alongside these systems, to the defense industry, and to anyone paying attention. Vengeance is a name about purpose. Fury is a name about speed and decisive application of force. Combined with the FQ designation and the Collaborative Combat Aircraft mission, these names are a statement that these aircraft are not support assets. They are combat aircraft.

How Autonomous Wingmen Change the Math of Air Warfare

The Collaborative Combat Aircraft concept addresses a specific problem in modern air warfare. Crewed platforms like the F-22 and F-35 represent enormous investment - decades of engineering, billions in development, and pilots who required years and significant resources to train. Projecting mass into a high-threat environment with crewed-only formations is constrained by cost, training pipeline length, and the value of the people at risk.

The Vengeance and the Fury are designed to operate as attritable airframes. That word is precise. It means the unit cost is low enough that losing one on a high-risk mission does not hollow out a program budget or require explaining a casualty. The F-35 is not attritable. These aircraft are designed to operate much closer to that threshold.

The operational concept compounds the math against an adversary. Instead of a two-ship of F-22s entering a defended area, a formation might include two crewed aircraft and four to six autonomous wingmen. An adversary air defense system now has to track and engage a significantly larger set of targets. The autonomous wingmen absorb threat attention, carry additional ordnance, and extend what a single pilot can accomplish in a complex environment.

What Flying Alongside Autonomous Wingmen Requires of Pilots

For the fighter pilots who will eventually fly the Vengeance and the Fury as wingmen, this represents a genuinely new skill set layered on top of existing fundamentals. Managing autonomous aircraft from a cockpit during a high-workload combat scenario is different from anything the fighter community has historically trained for.

A pilot in this environment is allocating tasks to aircraft responding to direction, deciding when to send them forward and when to hold them, and managing a formation that includes elements they cannot directly control the way they control their own aircraft. The human-machine integration challenge is substantial: what information does that pilot need, in what format, and at what point in the decision cycle? An autonomous wingman that increases cognitive workload rather than reducing it is failing at its primary function.

This is not a replacement for stick-and-rudder fundamentals. It is a new layer of airmanship that will require a training evolution across the fighter community over the next several years.

Why the Naming Announcement Happened at This Conference

The Air and Space Forces Association conference is one of the primary public forums where Air Force leadership addresses the force, the defense industry, allied partners, and outside observers. Strategy gets stated there. Programs get acknowledged. The service signals what it considers important and where it is placing resources.

Choosing this venue to name the Collaborative Combat Aircraft was deliberate. It communicated to the defense industrial base, to allied air forces that may eventually operate alongside these systems, and to the broader public that these programs are real, moving forward, and now carry names they will hold into operational service. Naming is a form of commitment. You name something when you are confident it will exist.

The competitive structure of the program is also worth noting. Running two Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs from two different manufacturers is not only about selecting the best design. It is about maintaining a defense industrial base capable of sustained innovation under competitive pressure. The Air Force has learned from programs where a sole-source vendor had no competitive pressure - where cost growth and schedule delays had nowhere to go. Two competing designs mean both teams are solving the same problems and being evaluated against each other throughout the process. Whether both designs reach full production or one eventually dominates the force structure, the competition itself generates engineering value.

Why General Aviation Pilots Should Pay Attention

The technology being developed for the Vengeance and the Fury will not remain confined to military airspace and overseas theaters. It never has.

GPS came from Department of Defense investment. TCAS - the traffic collision avoidance system - emerged from concerns about midair collisions in crowded national airspace. ADS-B, the system that now lets pilots see surrounding traffic on a panel display or in ForeFlight, came from a combination of military and civilian research pushed by the FAA and implemented across the entire airspace system.

Every major technology shift in how aircraft navigate, how they see each other, and how they communicate has had roots in military development, government investment, or both. The autonomous systems being refined for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program will inform how automation develops in commercial aviation, in air taxi operations, and in the unmanned traffic management frameworks the FAA is currently building for low-altitude uncrewed operations.

The decision-making architectures, sensor fusion approaches, and communication protocols between crewed and uncrewed aircraft operating in shared airspace are problems the military is solving now that the civilian aviation community will need answers to later. Every pilot in this country has a stake in how that technical and regulatory conversation develops.

Four Things to Watch as the Program Moves Forward

Human-machine integration will be a defining challenge. Getting right the information a fighter pilot needs - format, timing, level of detail - during an autonomous wingman mission is as important as the aircraft’s flight performance.

The test program continues. Transitioning from a Y-prefix designation to an operational name does not mean testing is complete. The Vengeance and the Fury will accumulate flight hours, operate in increasingly complex exercise scenarios, and eventually fly alongside crewed aircraft in realistic training environments. What emerges from that testing shapes the final operational concept and the tactics fighter squadrons will train to.

Mission expansion is an open question. The Collaborative Combat Aircraft program is currently focused on air-to-air and air-to-ground combat. Autonomous aircraft are being developed across the services for logistics, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare. Whether the collaborative concept expands beyond fighter escort is a question the coming years will answer.

Airspace integration will accelerate. As autonomous military aircraft become more capable and operate in more varied environments, conversations between the Department of Defense, the FAA, and the broader aviation community about how uncrewed aircraft coexist in the national airspace will intensify. Those conversations are already underway. The technology being refined for programs like the Vengeance and the Fury will push them forward.

Key Takeaways

Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink officially named the FQ-42 Vengeance (General Atomics) and FQ-44 Fury (Anduril Industries) at the Air and Space Forces Association conference, dropping the “Y” prototype prefix and signaling program commitment.
The FQ designation is unprecedented - a fighter-class uncrewed aircraft, distinct from surveillance or reconnaissance drones, designed to operate in contested airspace and deliver combat effects.
Both names carry specific aviation history: the Vultee Vengeance (WWII RAF/RAAF dive bomber) and the Fury lineage (Hawker Fury, FJ Fury), chosen to communicate intent and character, not just label hardware.
The Collaborative Combat Aircraft concept changes the math of air warfare by pairing attritable autonomous wingmen with crewed fighters, multiplying the force a single pilot can project into a high-threat environment.
The autonomous and sensor-fusion technology being developed for these programs has a historical pattern of migrating into civil aviation - GPS, TCAS, and ADS-B all followed this path - making the Vengeance and Fury programs relevant to every pilot, not just the fighter community.