NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Northrop Grumman is offering a revamped Model 437 aircraft as a “playground” testbed for developers of autonomy flight software, hoping to answer industry demand for more and faster testing of their technology.
Northrop announced the new testbed aircraft, dubbed Beacon has completed its first flight at an event featuring a half-dozen other companies during AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Sept. 23.
The reconfigured Model 437 flew with a pilot in the cockpit this week, said Tom Jones, the president of Northrop’s Aeronautics Systems sector. Following additional tests, Northrop’s aims to fly it using the company’s Prism autonomous flight software by the end of the year, with a pilot in the cockpit able to override the software if needed for safety.
The Air Force has expressed strong interest in autonomy, especially for its Collaborative Combat Aircraft, uncrewed, autonomously controlled jets. Drones, uncrewed cargo aircraft, uncrewed refuelers, and more have also had interest. Yet industry officials said they don’t have many ways to actually test and refine autonomous flight software in the real world.
“If you look at, what venues do I have as a performer in this space, as a nation, to test these things?” said Chris Gentile, general manager for tactical autonomy at Merlin Labs. “It just doesn’t exist. There has been [just one] representative CCA flight ever in the United States, just two weeks ago, and that was primarily remotely operated—not autonomous in any way.”
The Air Force is testing autonomy on converted F-16s through its VISTA and VENOM programs, but Dan Javorsek, president at EpiSci, called those efforts “completely insufficient.”
“It turns out that to develop precisely the algorithms that you’re going to take into combat with you, you need a place and a playground to go and do this,” Javorsek said.
Beacon is meant to be that playground. Northrop wants to provide startups and tech companies a certified, airworthy platform to work with, a cost-savings compared to having each firm develop their own aircraft.
“There are very rigorous rules around airworthiness and safety certification that potentially could stand in the road of rapid innovation in the field of bringing autonomy and AI to fruition for our warfighters,” Jones said. “By being able to integrate test pilots with the solution and have the ability to always have that safeguard there, we’re able to very rapidly integrate.”
The Air Force has split the requirements for aircraft and its native flight controls from the requirement for autonomy in its CCA program. That makes Northrop’s plan to provide a testbed for the autonomy portion more viable.
Jones said the Model 437 is cheap to fly and easy to maintain, enabling a fast test tempo.
Tom Pieronek, chief technology officer under Jones, suggested Northrop will look to fly as frequently as possible, potentially even multiple times per day.
That’s big for autonomy startups that say they need to test their software early and often to figure out updates—an aggressive, flexible approach the Pentagon has struggled at times to embrace.
“You got to get the thing up and flying,” Javorsek said. “And Beacon gives us an opportunity that is really separated and has some distance from the government to do precisely that. So I think all of us are looking forward to precisely getting more reps and sets on these sorts of systems.”
Indeed, Jack Zaientz, vice president of C4I and autonomy at SoarTech, suggested that the Air Force could embrace Beacon as a way to accelerate its own progress.
“The operative goal is not, ‘Can you get something done beautifully in 10 years? … ” Zaientz said. “It’s ‘go figure it out, talk amongst yourselves.’”
Northrop’s autonomous flight software will keep the aircraft flying and is meant to be open and modular with set standards, meaning other companies will be able to load and test their autonomous mission software—the tactics, techniques, and procedures to actually execute the missions the Air Force wants to automate.
More than one company will be able to put their software on the Beacon testbed at one time, added Pieronek. The pilot will have a tablet in the cockpit from which they can press a button to run different autonomous mission software, testing different maneuvers and actions.
And because of the open architecture of Beacon, firms can make rapid updates, added Kevin Fesler, chief customer officer at Red 6.
“By being able to use open mission systems and the standards and work things like Beacon, we can literally software define something today and test it tomorrow,” Fesler said.
Jones said he anticipates eventual interest from customers in both the U.S. government and abroad in using Beacon as an autonomy testbed. But much is still unsettled.
“This is a little bit of an experiment for us,” Jones said. Northrop first introduced Model 437 through its Scaled Composites subsidiary, envisioning it as a potential “loyal wingman” or CCA. But after its first flight in August 2024, Northrop needed to decide what to do with it.
They settled on the autonomy testbed idea. Over the past nine months, Jones said, Northrop “basically redid the avionics and the power systems so that we could interface with autonomous controllers.”
Now they’re rolling out the opportunity and waiting to see what kind of market emerges. “We thought this was a good idea,” Jones said. “I still think it’s a really good idea. And we’re going to do some demonstrations. And I think this is a little bit of a ‘build it, and they will come.’”
