U.S. Navy Opens Race for First Carrier-Based Loyal Wingman Combat Aircraft for Ford and Nimitz Class Carriers.

The U.S. Navy is moving to field a carrier-capable autonomous combat aircraft designed to extend the reach and firepower of its crewed fighters, with Naval Air Systems Command opening industry engagement for two functional prototypes on August 31, 2026. The effort could give Gerald R. Ford- and Nimitz-class carriers weaponized, risk-tolerant uncrewed aircraft able to carry sensors and weapons deeper into contested airspace while reducing risk to pilots.

The first Collaborative Combat Aircraft increment is expected to combine extended range and autonomous operations with catapult launches, arrested landings, and a compact flight-deck footprint. Integrating these capabilities into carrier air wings would allow the Navy to distribute weapons, sensors, and operational risk across larger formations, strengthening survivability and combat mass against increasingly capable air and missile defenses.

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The X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System demonstrator taxis aboard USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75), whose pioneering unmanned aircraft trials helped establish experience relevant to the U.S. Navy’s current push for carrier-capable Collaborative Combat Aircraft operating from Ford and Nimitz-class carriers (Picture Source: U.S. Navy)

On August 31, 2026, the U.S. Navy moved its Collaborative Combat Aircraft ambitions decisively toward hardware by opening industry engagement for the first increment of a carrier-capable autonomous combat aircraft. The initiative is aimed at producing two fully functional prototypes on an accelerated timeline, creating a pathway toward weaponized, extended-range and risk-tolerant uncrewed aircraft operating alongside the Navy's crewed fighters. More than another unmanned aviation program, CCA Increment 1 could reshape how a Carrier Air Wing distributes sensors, weapons, range and operational risk across contested battlespace. The development is detailed in Naval Air Systems Command RFI N00019-27-RFI-PMA228-CCA, issued for PMA-228 on August 31 and reproduced by SAM Directory, with industry responses due September 18, 2026.

From ‘Loyal Wingman’ to an Autonomous Carrier Combat System

Naval Air Systems Command, acting on behalf of the Future Advanced Capability Program Office PMA-228, is exploring an Increment 1 prototype that goes considerably beyond the conventional concept of a remotely piloted drone. The Navy describes an affordable, highly capable, risk-tolerant, carrier-capable, weaponized and extended-range autonomous unmanned air vehicle able to deploy from and recover aboard both Gerald R. Ford-class and Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. PMA-228 wants to reduce technical risk while evaluating range, payload capacity, carrier integration and a minimized flight-deck footprint, with the longer-term objective of strengthening the survivability, lethality and capacity of fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft through collaborative Manned-Unmanned Teaming, or MUM-T. The distinction is important: Navy CCA is not intended merely to fly autonomously from a runway. It must become an integrated element of the Carrier Air Wing and survive the mechanical, environmental and operational demands of naval aviation, including catapult launches, arrested landings, saltwater exposure, constrained deck handling and high-tempo cyclic operations. In this context, deck footprint itself becomes a combat-performance parameter because an aircraft that consumes excessive parking, handling or hangar volume can reduce the total striking power embarked aboard a carrier.

The operational concept also points toward a fundamental change in how U.S. naval aviation generates combat mass. A CCA does not need to reproduce every capability of an F-35C or F/A-18E/F to become operationally decisive. Autonomous teammates could push sensors farther forward, carry additional weapons, act as electronic-warfare or communications nodes, extend targeting networks or operate in threat sectors where committing another crewed aircraft would impose greater tactical and strategic risk. Such aircraft could expand the tactical geometry of a Carrier Air Wing by distributing detection, targeting and engagement functions across larger formations while retaining human judgment at the mission-command level. Navy experimentation already provides evidence of this direction. In December 2025, two BQM-177A aircraft operated autonomously in a Live Virtual Constructive environment in which a virtual F/A-18 acted as mission lead and tasked the autonomous aircraft to defend designated combat air patrol areas against simulated adversaries. NAVAIR said the demonstration advanced its Autonomy Government Reference Architecture and future CCA development. This is a critical conceptual shift: the objective is not necessarily for an aviator to remotely fly every autonomous aircraft, but for crewed platforms to issue mission-level commands to machines capable of executing tactical behaviors with increasing independence.

Ford and Nimitz Compatibility Creates a Uniquely Naval Engineering Challenge

Perhaps the most strategically consequential element of Increment 1 is the requirement to operate across both generations of America's nuclear-powered carrier fleet. Gerald R. Ford-class ships employ the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, and Advanced Arresting Gear, while Nimitz-class carriers retain traditional steam-driven catapults and variants of the Mk-7 arresting system. NAVAIR describes EMALS as capable of launching aircraft across a wide weight envelope, from lightweight unmanned platforms to heavy strike fighters, while AAG is designed to recover a similarly broad range of aircraft. The legacy Mk-7 remains installed aboard the Nimitz-class. Requiring CCA to interface with both architectures creates a demanding certification challenge involving launch loads, arrestment energy, landing characteristics, structural margins, flight-control logic and carrier approach performance. It also represents a major strategic advantage if achieved: rather than restricting autonomous combat aviation to the newest Ford-class ships, the Navy could create a common CCA capability relevant across the wider CVN force. Such compatibility would accelerate fleet-wide adoption and prevent autonomous combat aviation from becoming a niche technology waiting decades for complete carrier recapitalization.

The RFI shows that the Navy is treating this challenge as an integrated digital, software and airworthiness problem rather than simply an airframe competition. NAVAIR is seeking autonomy software baselines and certification artifacts, digital design models and a digital twin, scalable manufacturing information, modeling and simulation data, Live Virtual Constructive test products, flight telemetry, instrumentation and documentation supporting Flight Clearance for CVN qualification testing. Particularly revealing is the requirement for a “Platform In A Box” digital representation separated from command-and-control, Mission Planning and Mission Autonomy systems, alongside government access to hardware-agnostic C2 and human-machine interfaces for independent verification. This points toward a modular architecture in which the aircraft, autonomy stack, mission applications and operator interface can evolve on different technological cycles rather than becoming permanently locked into one proprietary platform. Such separation could give the Navy greater freedom to migrate autonomy applications between air vehicles, introduce new payloads or tactical behaviors through software updates, and maintain competition across future CCA increments. For a combat aircraft family expected to evolve rapidly, ownership and accessibility of the digital architecture may eventually become almost as strategically important as range, signature and payload.

Affordable Combat Mass Could Redefine the Carrier Air Wing

The Navy is also entering CCA with an institutional advantage created by the MQ-25 Stingray program. MQ-25 is establishing procedures, command-and-control infrastructure and shipboard experience for operating unmanned aircraft from nuclear-powered carriers, reducing the organizational distance between today's Carrier Air Wing and a future mixed crewed-uncrewed force. The Navy installed its first operational Unmanned Air Warfare Center aboard USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77), with NAVAIR explicitly stating that the Unmanned Carrier Aviation Mission Control System will initially support MQ-25 and can form the foundation for future unmanned systems including Collaborative Combat Aircraft. The MQ-25A itself conducted its first test flight in April 2026, further advancing the Navy's transition toward operational unmanned carrier aviation.

Against this backdrop, CCA Increment 1 is less an isolated drone program than another layer of an emerging naval aviation ecosystem combining autonomous aircraft, government-controlled mission architectures, digital engineering and human-machine teaming. The industrial requirements reinforce that approach: NAVAIR is asking for scalable manufacturing plans, supply-chain resilience and affordability/producibility analysis, indicating that the objective is not simply to build an exquisite demonstrator but to understand how autonomous combat capability could eventually be generated in meaningful numbers. The Air Force's experience provides additional momentum, with its YFQ-42A already in flight testing and CCA operational experimentation underway, while the Marine Corps' 2026 Aviation Plan similarly expands collaborative combat aircraft and MUM-T development. The Navy's problem remains uniquely difficult because its autonomous combat aircraft must combine tactical autonomy and affordable production with the unforgiving requirements of persistent operations at sea.

CCA Increment 1 is best understood not as an unmanned replacement for the F-35C or F/A-18E/F, but as the opening move toward a distributed, software-defined Carrier Air Wing in which crewed fighters and autonomous combat aircraft operate as a coordinated system. In a high-end maritime campaign, extended-range autonomous platforms could move sensing, electronic warfare and weapon capacity farther from the carrier, increase airborne magazine depth, complicate an adversary's targeting problem and allow commanders to expose risk-tolerant machines to threat environments that would otherwise require additional crewed fighters. This is particularly relevant to operations across the vast distances of the Indo-Pacific, where carrier aviation must balance offensive reach against increasingly sophisticated long-range surveillance, air-defense and anti-ship strike networks.

The Navy's deliberate use of the term risk-tolerant is equally important. A carrier-capable autonomous combat aircraft equipped for repeated catapult launches, arrested recoveries, sophisticated mission autonomy and reusable shipboard operations should not automatically be viewed as a disposable asset. Its value lies instead in giving commanders a different calculus of cost, survivability and acceptable operational risk than exists with a crewed fifth-generation fighter. Once autonomous aircraft can reliably launch, recover, receive mission-level tasking, integrate into naval kill webs and return to the carrier for rapid regeneration, Carrier Air Wing combat power is no longer constrained exclusively by the number of pilots and crewed cockpits embarked aboard the ship. The August 31 RFI is still an information and market-research instrument rather than a solicitation, and the Government has made no commitment to award an agreement. NAVAIR is, however, considering a potential prototype project using Other Transaction Authority under 10 U.S.C. §4022 and has indicated that industry feedback could precede a Request for White Papers and subsequent Request for Project Proposal. That acquisition pathway, combined with scalable manufacturing, modular open standards and government-accessible autonomy architecture, signals a clear emphasis on speed and technological adaptability.

If Increment 1 succeeds, its greatest contribution may extend beyond whichever prototype reaches the flight deck first. The enduring strategic advantage would be the creation of a carrier-compatible autonomy and integration architecture capable of accepting successive generations of aircraft, software and mission systems at a faster pace than traditional naval combat-aircraft development. By making autonomous combat aviation compatible with both Gerald R. Ford- and Nimitz-class carriers, the United States could gain a powerful mechanism for increasing range, mass, persistence and tactical flexibility across its existing carrier force while preserving the ability of the Carrier Strike Group to deliver sophisticated airpower without dependence on fixed land bases. That combination would represent a significant evolution of one of the U.S. Navy's defining strengths: the capacity to move, concentrate, regenerate and continuously modernize combat airpower from the sea.

Written by Teoman S. Nicanci – Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group

Teoman S. Nicanci holds degrees in Political Science, Comparative and International Politics, and International Relations and Diplomacy from leading Belgian universities, with research focused on Russian strategic behavior, defense technology, and modern warfare. He is a defense analyst at Army Recognition, specializing in the global defense industry, military armament, and emerging defense technologies.

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