After more than three decades of being the sole manufacturer for its renowned range of UAS (the first Predator flew in July 1994 and made its operational debut the following year), General Atomics – Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) on 23 October announced a partnership with Spirit Defense to support airframe production for the FQ-42 Vengeance collaborative combat aircraft (CCA).
In June, GA-ASI won a USAF contract for FQ-42 production – the first UAS to carry the ‘F’ prefix to indicate a fighter platform. The role of Spirit Defense – a Boeing company – will be as a fuselage design-build partner, bringing engineering and advanced manufacturing capabilities to support the programme from design through to series production. Effectively, this allows GA-ASI to scale production faster while strengthening production resilience and thus reducing single point of failure risks. “This kind of partnership represents the scalable industrial base the Air Force [is] looking for from industry,” commented GA-ASI President, David R Alexander.
Potential CCA manufacturing partnerships don’t end here. GA-ASI is currently in discussion with several armed forces around the world on the Gambit series – a family of modular CCAs derived from work on the FQ-42, XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station and MQ-20 Avenger. They are intended for roles such as EW, SEAD/DEAD and precision strike, offering versatile response options for evolving threats. GA-ASI states that nations interested in the Gambit series “have an opportunity to insert indigenous manufacturing into those programs, as well as integration of their own sensors, weapons and other combat technologies”.
DA Comment
Readers should not be surprised at GA-ASI’s decision: nor should they read too much into it. The company has a deep well of experience in making clear-sighted, grown-up decisions and addressing the potential bottleneck of airframe production in this manner speaks directly to the customer’s aspiration and the long-term viability of the programme as demand for volume likely increases. Furthermore, offloading some of the pressure on its own workflow and workforce allows GA-ASI to focus more effort on what it has proven to be good at – technological innovation and capability insertion.
As Alexander said in a release earlier this year: “If you wait five, eight years to bring these aircraft to combat, they’ll be too late […] They need to come out now and they need to come out in large numbers. That’s really where we are now. The time for talk is done.”
Words to live by.
Main image shows the YFQ-42 on the flightline at GA-ASI’s High Desert Test Range as part of the USAF’s CCA flight test campaign. (GA-ASI)
