LONDON — A US Air Force wingman drone for the first time “successfully” fired a live munition, an AMRAAM air-to-air missile, during a recent test, Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach revealed to Breaking Defense.
“It wasn’t just an AMRAAM that came off,” Wilsbach said in an exclusive interview today on the sidelines of the Global Air & Space Chiefs conference here, “it was tracking the target.”
Wilsbach declined to divulge more details of the test, citing operational security. But, he said the aircraft involved was Anduril’s YFQ-44A, which the Air Force previously revealed was the first of its Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) to carry an inert version of the AMRAAM. In a press release, the Air Force said the weapon was fired at a “digital target” over the Mojave Desert.
Though a selling point often cited for CCAs is their ability to fly with a great deal of autonomy, the Air Force stressed that any decision to fire weapons will have to be made by human operators.
The recent Anduril test fire “was more than a simple weapons release test — it demonstrated an end-to-end, beyond-line-of-sight strike against a simulated target,” Mark Shushmar, Anduril’s vice president of autonomous airpower, said in a statement to Breaking Defense.
