GA-ASI UNVEILS WILDFIRE UAS FOR MILITARY, CIVIL AND COMMERCIAL ROLES

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) unveiled Wildfire on 10 September, a clean-sheet uncrewed aircraft the company says is designed to maximise future investment in large uncrewed aircraft while incorporating lessons from decades of large-scale global operations. GA-ASI says Wildfire draws on more than 30 years of experience delivering over 1,600 uncrewed aircraft, including the MQ-1B Predator, MQ-9A Reaper, MQ-9B SkyGuardian, MQ-20 Avenger and FQ-42A Collaborative Combat Aircraft, with the company’s aircraft having amassed nearly 10 million total flight hours, most of it in combat. “This is exactly the right design for high-demand missions and cost-conscious customers,” said GA-ASI President David R. Alexander. “Our tailor-designed, attrition-tolerant Wildfire balances the high capability our aircraft are known for with huge flexibility and great scalability. There’s never been anything like it before.”

A COMPLEMENT TO THE MQ-9B, NOT A REPLACEMENT

GA-ASI positions Wildfire as sitting alongside its MQ-9B line rather than superseding it. “We’ve defined the top end of what medium-altitude, long-endurance uncrewed aircraft can do,” Alexander said. “Our MQ-9B is showing that it can do almost anything. Hunt for submarines, defend against drones, perform airborne early warning and many other missions, and that won’t change. But Wildfire is different. It’s focused on core ISR, strike and similar roles. This is a high-volume, lower-cost airplane that does a few things really well.” GA-ASI has proposed Wildfire for the US Air Force’s Massed Modular Aircraft (MMA) competition, run within the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) as a route to an alternative to the MQ-9A Reaper. According to GA-ASI, Wildfire exceeds the competition’s requirements, offering a ferry range beyond 8,000 nautical miles and the capacity to carry two Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles simultaneously, or alternatively four Joint Strike Missiles or other combinations of munitions, sensors and payloads. The company says the aircraft’s autonomy software supports networked, collaborative control of dozens of Wildfires at once, using proliferated low-earth-orbit satellite links already proven on other GA-ASI aircraft, and that its existing manufacturing base could allow deliveries years ahead of the DIU’s FY2031 target at more than twice the production rate.

ALSO TODAY: GA-ASI AND TACTICAL AIR SUPPORT DEMONSTRATE AUTONOMOUS KILL-CHAIN TEAMING

GA-ASI separately disclosed that on 21 July it had flown a joint flight test with Tactical Air Support, Inc. during a large force exercise, pairing a manned Tactical Air Support F-5 Advanced Tiger with an unmanned GA-ASI Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) test aircraft to demonstrate Infrared Search and Track (IRST) Multi-Ship Ranging. Both aircraft carried GA-ASI’s TacACE (Tactical Autonomy Ecosystem) software, built on the Agile Mission Suite variant of the government’s Autonomy Government Reference Architecture, alongside an infrared search-and-track sensor. Using a beyond-line-of-sight data link, the F-5 relayed target data to the CCA’s TacACE system, allowing the two aircraft to fuse sensor data to track and engage a simulated airborne target, which GA-ASI describes as evidence that aircraft from different manufacturers can interoperate on a common, plug-and-play reference architecture rather than requiring a single vendor’s system. “With this flight, we moved beyond simply flying an autonomous jet and showed how a manned fighter and an autonomous CCA can work together to find, track, and engage a target using passive sensors and shared autonomy,” said Michael Roberts, Advanced Programs Emerging Technology Director at GA-ASI. “This is the kind of operationally relevant mission that will allow autonomous CCAs to deploy alongside manned aircraft and deliver real combat capability for the warfighter. The flight test marks another milestone in warfighter adoption of the CCA solution and confirms its readiness for production.”

Note: GA-ASI describes this as one of an ongoing, increasingly complex series of flight tests rather than a one-off demonstration; WAN could not independently verify GA-ASI’s claim of interoperability with other manufacturers’ platforms beyond what is stated in the company’s own release.