The Anduril YFQ-44 Fury carries a designation that didn't exist until recently — FQ, the U.S. Air Force's new fighter prefix for unmanned combat systems. For the first time since the jet age began, the Air Force is formally classifying an unmanned aircraft as a fighter. That is not a bureaucratic footnote. That is a statement about where aerial warfare is going.
Selected in April 2024 as one of two winners for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) Increment I program, the Fury is designed not to replace human pilots but to fly alongside them as an autonomous wingman — expanding what an F-22 or F-35 pilot can do by extending their reach, absorbing risk, and multiplying the threats any adversary has to track simultaneously. The aircraft is affordable enough to be produced in numbers that change the math of aerial combat. You don't have to shoot down every Fury if there are forty of them.
Originally developed by Blue Force Technologies as an aggressor training platform before Anduril's acquisition in 2023, the aircraft features swept trapezoidal wings, a chin-mounted inlet, and a Williams FJ44-4M turbofan producing 4,000 pounds of thrust. It can reach 50,000 feet, approach Mach 0.95, and pull up to 9g. The YFQ-44 made its first flight in October 2025.
Serial number AE 0001 — the very first production example — was on static display at the Beale Air and Space Expo 2025. A public airshow. Both CCA competitors, the Fury and the General Atomics YFQ-42A, were present at the same event, giving civilians their first opportunity to stand next to what the next generation of American air combat looks like up close. That doesn't happen twice.