Collaborative Combat Aircraft Market 2026: CCA Programmes

Increment 1 is in production. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that the Department of the Air Force announced on 17 June 2026 that it had awarded both General Atomics and Anduril engineering and manufacturing development and production contracts, that the YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A will become the FQ-42A and FQ-44A, and that the Air Force will officially build at least 150 CCAs combined by the end of the decade in the first increment. Colonel Timothy Helfrich, portfolio acquisition executive for fighters and advanced aircraft, said the air vehicle contracts were awarded four months ahead of schedule and that the service is meeting or exceeding its goal of one-third the cost of an F-35, or roughly less than USD 30 million per tail. The total contract value is classified. Both designs advance together rather than through a down-select.

Increment 2 is in concept refinement. DefenseScoop reported on 30 July 2026 that the Air Force is working with nine vendors it has not named to outline concepts and define requirements, with approximately 10 months left on the concept-refinement contract, and that Helfrich said the service is shooting for roughly six vendors in early prototyping next year. Aviation Today reported in June 2026 that all 20-plus industry partners in the vendor pool will have the opportunity to compete for the next design phase. Helfrich described Increment 2 aircraft as optionally attritable rather than purely expendable, and John Sneden, the propulsion acquisition executive, said the requirements will be greater than for Increment 1, with clean-sheet engines under consideration and preliminary propulsion design running through May 2027 across Beehive Industries, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney, GE Aerospace, Kratos and Rolls-Royce.

Funding, per the Congressional Research Service, was USD 711.7 million in discretionary research funding for fiscal 2025 plus USD 678 million in mandatory funding from the reconciliation act, and USD 126.4 million in discretionary funding requested for fiscal 2026 (USD 111.4 million research and USD 15 million procurement), for a total identified fiscal 2026 figure of USD 804.4 million including the mandatory money. The original 2024 design contracts went to Anduril, Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

Two US primes that did not win Increment 1 are building aircraft on their own money, and Boeing is bringing the MQ-28 from its Australian programme. The Air Force assigned the designation YFQ-48A to Northrop Grumman's Project Talon prototype on 22 December 2025, a semi-autonomous prototype intended as a fighter per The Aviationist, which the UK Defence Journal described as a semi-autonomous low-cost platform intended to operate alongside crewed fighters, and Brigadier General Jason Voorheis said the approach is meant to foster competition, drive industry innovation and deliver technology at speed and scale. The Aviationist reported on 3 October 2026 that the internally funded YFQ-48A, now named Talon Blue, had completed its first fully autonomous flight from the Mojave Air and Space Port, including taxi, take-off, in-flight manoeuvres and landing.

Lockheed Martin is building five Vectis aircraft including the initial prototype, using its own funds, with first flight scheduled for late 2027, according to Dan Tenney, the company's senior vice-president for global business development and strategy, as reported by Janes on 7 October 2026. Boeing's MQ-28 Ghost Bat, developed with Australia, closed out 2025 with an AIM-120 shot from a Ghost Bat flying with F/A-18s and an E-7, and Boeing Australia expects the operational version to be flying for the Royal Australian Air Force by 2028, per Aviation Week as cited by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

BAE Systems unveiled Brontanax at the Farnborough International Airshow on 22 July 2026, the UK's first sovereign collaborative combat aircraft, developed by its FalconWorks division at Warton: a low-observable delta-wing aircraft with a maximum take-off weight of more than five tonnes and an internal weapons bay, self-funded with several hundred million pounds since 2022 according to the company, and positioned to fly initially alongside Typhoon and later the GCAP fighter. Drone Intelligence's briefing on the aircraft is linked below.

Helsing unveiled the CA-1 Europa in September 2025. The War Zone reports a weight of around 8,800 pounds and a length of around 36 feet, a loyal-wingman role working with crewed platforms, a first flight planned for 2027 and operational service before 2031, with the company saying it will invest hundreds of millions of euros in the project. BAE describes Brontanax as self-funded and Helsing says it will invest hundreds of millions of euros in the CA-1, and both are bets that the European fighter fleets, Typhoon, Rafale and GCAP, will buy uncrewed wingmen the way the US Air Force now has.

SNS Insider's report, last updated 27 July 2026, puts the market at USD 900.0 million in 2025 and USD 1,008.0 million in 2026, reaching USD 2,795.3 million by 2035 at a 12.0% CAGR over 2026 to 2035. It records airframe and platform hardware as the largest component segment in 2025, the air force as the largest end user, and training, test and tactics development as the largest mission role, which is consistent with a market still in the prototype and early-production phase. MarketsandMarkets' September 2026 estimate is approximately USD 0.9 billion in 2025 reaching around USD 2.8 billion by 2035 at about 12%. Both are vendor forecasts; this page has not reviewed their methodologies, and the classified Increment 1 contract value cannot be checked against either.

Twenty companies appear on SNS Insider's list: Lockheed Martin, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Anduril, Boeing Defense Space & Security, Kratos, Northrop Grumman, RTX (Collins Aerospace), L3Harris, Textron Systems, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Dassault Aviation, Saab, Israel Aerospace Industries, Elbit Systems, Turkish Aerospace Industries, Shield AI, AeroVironment, Sierra Nevada Corporation and QinetiQ. The structural point is that the two production contracts went to Anduril and General Atomics, with Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin self-funding aircraft to compete for Increment 2.

Collaborative combat aircraft are designed to carry weapons under autonomy software, and that puts them inside the US policy on autonomy in weapon systems. The Congressional Research Service summarises Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, most recently updated in January 2023, as defining lethal autonomous weapon systems as weapon systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator, and as requiring that systems be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. The Air Force's own description of the YFQ-48A as semi-autonomous, and the concept of pairing CCAs with crewed fighters, put a human in the formation; whether that meets the directive's standard in practice is not settled in the sources reviewed for this page. Internationally, states parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons have referred lethal autonomy to a Group of Governmental Experts.