MOJAVE, Calif.—There is a new entrant in the highly competitive field of collaborative combat aircraft—semi-autonomous drones meant to fly alongside manned combat aircraft. Northrop Grumman unveiled its new Project Talon aircraft to a small group of reporters at the facilities of its subsidiary Scaled Composites here Dec. 3.
The new plane is a bid by Northrop to rethink its loyal wingman concept after losing out on a contract for Increment 1 of the Air Force’s CCA program last year. The company’s original design proposal was highly capable but appears to have been judged too costly to win the Air Force’s initial design awards.
Project Talon is “significantly different” from that design, Tom Jones, vice president of Northrop’s aeronautics division, said during its unveiling at the Mojave Air and Space Port, where Scaled is based.
“The idea was to see if we could build an aircraft that had all the same capability of our original offering, and do it faster,” Jones said. “So the outcome was an aircraft, but the outcome we’re shooting for was the process: How do we design and build things that perform at a high level, but that we can build quickly now and can do affordably?”
Northrop officials said they achieved that goa, but were sparing in sharing details; the company did not disclose performance specifications, cost, or details on most aspects of the design, including the aircraft’s engine.
Jones also demurred when asked whether he believes Project Talon would have won an award for Increment 1 of CCA, which instead went to Andruil and General Atomics. “All I can say about what could have happened is we would have had a better offering,” he said.
Northrop said the Project Talon aircraft is around 1,000 pounds lighter than its Increment 1 design, uses around 50 percent fewer parts, and has a 30 percent faster construction time.
The aircraft was developed and built by a joint team of Northrop and Scaled Composites. Scaled, a small team of around a couple of hundred employees, designs and builds unique test or one-off aircraft, often very quickly.
The time between when the aircraft was conceived and when it had “weight on wheels” was roughly 15 months, and it is expected to fly around nine months from now, around fall 2026.
“We’re still extremely good at making something very complex,” Jones said. “So this was really about broadening that paradigm to what it means to be a high-performing engineering, aviation, development, and manufacturing organization to encompass all aspects of it.”
The aircraft, Northrop said, is not the company’s entrant for Increment 2 of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which is expected but not confirmed to have different requirements than Increment 1. Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink has suggested the service may be seeking a cheaper option than the Increment 1 aircraft. The YFQ-42 and YFQ-44 aircraft could cost around $30 million each.
“I’d like to see it come in substantially less than that, like maybe half,” Meink told Air & Space Forces Magazine earlier this fall.
Jones said multiple U.S. military services and international partners are interested in the Project Talon drone, and that some of those potential customers have visited the aircraft in Mojave.
Jones said the aircraft could perform “multiple missions” and has “payload space,” though he sidestepped questions about its internal weapons bay and did not list which missions it could perform.
Northrop builds some of the most advanced aircraft in the world, such as the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, two of which are undergoing flight testing at nearby Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., with even more being built at Plant 42 in Palmdale. But after losing out on the Increment 1 design competition, Northrop officials said they decided to try a new approach.
“You need that exquisiteness in some things. But the whole concept behind Collaborative Combat Aircraft, it’s all about affordable mass, which means you need to keep the cost down,” Jones said. “And then the other thing is, because you would use affordable mass ostensibly in a war of attrition, you’re going to lose these. So not only do you want it to be affordable, you want to be able to replenish that mass at rate.”
Being able to develop a project quickly, however, often does not translate to a cheaper product. When asked how the company approached the challenge, Northrop and Scaled executives acknowledged the tension.
“I think the debate has been ongoing, continues to rage, on affordability versus performance,” Jones said. “This was an experiment on a new methodology for designing aircraft faster that would enable us to scale manufacturing faster, which we believe is going to be a key requirement. … We need to be able to ramp up manufacturing quickly. This was built to be produced quickly, not just to be affordable.”
Northrop’s efforts to develop a new CCA have been a topic of speculation for months. Aviation Week reported in October that Northrop was developing a secretive aircraft known as “Project Lotus.” Jones confirmed that Project Talon was originally called Project Lotus. Northrop said its current name is a nod to the Air Force’s long-time training jet, the T-38 Talon, a highly maneuverable aircraft that was also built in great numbers, with around 1,200 produced.
Northrop is not the only company that has built a CCA in-house instead of waiting for a specific contract or program, such as the Air Force’s Increment 2 or the Navy’s future CCA. Lockheed Martin is also developing a semi-autonomous drone called Vectics which could be used as a CCA. It plans to fly that aircraft in 2027.
Whether Project Talon will ultimately turn into a fielded system is yet to be seen. Asked whether the aircraft will carry any special designs on the bottom of the fuselage during testing, as Northrop has done with the B-21 and its YF-23 stealth fighter prototype, Jones quipped to Air & Space Forces Magazine that he is open to ideas.
“If you buy one, we’ll paint it any color you want,” he said.
