Troy Meink said the Department of the Air Force ordered two unmanned combat aerial vehicle fighters into production on June 17, putting General Atomics’ FQ-42A Dark Merlin and Anduril’s FQ-44A Fury into manufacturing. He tied the award to a plan to buy over 150 combat capable CCA by the end of the decade.
FQ-42A Dark Merlin
The two aircraft moved from YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A to FQ-42A and FQ-44A in 2025. The FQ series is the first fighter-drone designation the Air Force has ever issued, and the Y drops away when a test airframe becomes a production model rather than a one-off demonstrator.
General Atomics named its aircraft in February. David R. Alexander said, “They harass other falcons for fun, and they eat what they kill.” The company’s reference to dark merlins points to small, dark-feathered falcons that ambush other birds in flight and hunt cooperatively in groups.
FQ-44A Fury
Fury started life at Blue Force Technologies under the name Grackle, then REDmedium, before Anduril bought Blue Force Technologies in September 2023. The aircraft was designed to imitate a modern adversary fighter during training so the Air Force would not have to burn hours on crewed jets doing it.
On July 27, Anduril rolled the first Ohio-built Fury off the line at Arsenal-1 in Pickaway County near Rickenbacker International Airport. One of the new combat drones later fired an AIM-120 over the Mojave at a target that existed only in software, showing that the program has already moved beyond paper orders and into live weapons use.
CCA by decade’s end
The Air Force’s plan reaches beyond the first two jets. Meink said the contracts support a purchase path that could get the service to around 1,000 aircraft, a scale that turns CCA into a fleet rather than a niche program.
Fury’s path is the sharpest example of the shift. It was built to play the enemy in training, then pulled into the Air Force’s combat drone competition, and now it is the one doing the shooting. That is the program’s real breakpoint: two production awards, one live missile shot, and a buying plan measured in the hundreds.
