Brits beat RAAF and US Air Force to the punch on collaborative aircraft

The Royal Air Force has declared operational its StormShroud autonomous Uncrewed Aerial System (UAS), beating the RAAF and US Air Force to the punch.

The first military combat aircraft to be designed, engineered and manufactured in Australia in more than 50 years, the MQ-28A Ghost Bat, is a collaborative combat aircraft (CCA), an entirely new technology.

The Royal Air Force has beaten the RAAF and US Air Force to the punch. It has already declared operational its StormShroud autonomous Uncrewed Aerial System (UAS), which will fly alongside crewed aircraft to blind enemy air defences.

The StormShroud consists of the Anglo-Portuguese Tekever company’s AR3 UAS carrying a Leonardo UK BriteStorm signal jammer to disrupt enemy radar at long ranges.

StormShroud acts as an Autonomous Collaborative Platform (ACP), or Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) to use US parlance, and will support crewed RAF combat aircraft such as the BAE Systems Typhoon and Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II by allowing them to attack targets without being seen on radar. This is similar to the RAAF and US Navy-manned EA-18G Growler, based on the Super Hornet, which also jams enemy air defence radars and communications and uses anti-radar missiles to destroy them.

This year, the RAAF and USAF plan to test their own autonomous CCAs with crewed combat aircraft and each could put a CCA into production soon afterwards.

Flight testing of Boeing’s Australian-built MQ-28A Ghost Bat has progressed, says Glen Ferguson, the company’s director of the MQ-28 Global Program.

“We have turned our focus to validating mission systems, payloads and operational requirements. This will culminate in a series of events with RAAF assets throughout 2025, collectively known as Capability Demonstration 2025.”

These events are already under way, Ferguson adds.

The big difference between Ghost Bat and StormShroud is size and speed. The Tekever AR3 is 1.9m long, weighs just 25kg, has a 4kg payload capacity and cruises at 75-90km/h. Boeing Defence Australia’s Ghost Bat is 11.7m long, weighs about 3200kg, flies at “fighter-like” high-subsonic speeds, is very manoeuvrable and has a range of about 2000nm. It won’t carry weapons, at least initially, according to the RAAF, but has a nose section containing electronic payloads that can be removed and swapped quickly so it can fly multiple different Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) and other classified missions.

The Ghost Bat takes off and lands under ground control. In flight it comes under the command of a Mission Execution Custodian and could fly autonomously alongside an aircraft or a long way ahead, using sensors for reconnaissance or to spot and mark for destruction enemy aircraft, air defences and other ­targets.

The two USAF CCA prototypes, which are designed to carry air-to-air missiles such as the 161kg, 3.65m-long Raytheon AIM-120 AMRAAM, are the General Atomics YFQ-42A and Anduril Industries YFQ-44A, based on the company’s 6.1m-long Fury UAS. Anduril showed a full-scale mock-up of this at the Avalon Airshow in March.

The Fury is capable of pulling 9G and flying at up to Mach .95 and the General Atomics aircraft is believed to be capable of similar performance.

They will fly this northern summer, says General David Allvin, the USAF Chief of Staff, and one of them could enter production in 2026 to operate with the new 6th generation USAF fighter, the F-47.

The unarmed, semi-stealthy MQ-28A Ghost Bat, which has achieved more than 100 test flights, is designed to support crewed RAAF aircraft such as the E-7A Wedgetail, F-35A Lightning II and F/A-18F Super Hornet.

Capability Demonstration 2025, says Ferguson, “will be a demonstration of a complete CCA capability, where we will be using a number of MQ-28s … to validate the concept of operations. Teaming can be achieved with any datalink-enabled crewed platform without any modification.”

The Ghost Bat was announced in 2019 and is the world’s first CCA, according to Boeing. It is Australia’s first domestic combat aircraft design since the Pika and Jindivik programs, more than 70 years ago. The RAAF’s total investment in this program is now around $900m and although it has said it just wants an ISR payload at present, Boeing intends to test the Ghost Bat with air-to-air missiles late this year, says Ferguson.

Nearly 200 Australian companies have participated in Ghost Bat’s supply chain. Its Vehicle Management System (VMS) provides its trusted autonomy and is developed by BAE Systems Australia, which is a global leader in autonomous control systems.

The MQ-28A employs advanced manufacturing technology such as resin infusion, invented at Boeing’s Fishermans Bend site in Melbourne for carbon fibre components used on the civilian Boeing 787. If selected by the RAAF, the aircraft will be built at a new, 9000sq m factory at Toowoomba’s Wellcamp Airport, Boeing’s first final assembly facility outside North America.