Pilots 
flying in the new cockpit that Boeing has designed for legacy C-130H transports may now use the cockpit’s head-up display and head-down primary flight display as their primary flight reference, the company announced Thursday. This comes after the displays’ endorsement by the Air Staff’s operations directorate (A3O) after a four-year period of design reviews, lab evaluations, and demonstrations. Boeing developed these displays under the C-130 Avionics Modernization Program, which entered low-rate production in June. “This endorsement means C-130 AMP pilots can now use the HUD as their sole primary flight reference, allowing them to use their head-down displays for other data,” said Mahesh Reddy, Boeing’s C-130 AMP program manager. All aircraft have a requirement for a primary flight reference that must include airspeed, altitude, and attitude data, as well as flight-path information.
The Air Force is leaning toward a less-sophisticated autonomous aircraft in the second increment of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, the services chief futurist said. He also suggested that the next increment of CCA may be air-launched, a la the "Rapid Dragon" experiments conducted by the service in recent years.