Aviation Week&#x27;s Robert Wall, Steve Trimble and Brian Everstine explore the U.S. Air Force&#x27;s award of Collaborative Combat Aircraft production contracts to Anduril and General Atomics.<br>Thank you to our sponsor, GE Aerospace. GE Aerospace is uniquely positioned to support the Defense sector, providing reliable high performance, innovative military engines, systems and services.<br>Learn more at geaerospace.com/military-defense

What's Next For CCAs After U.S. Air Force Downselect?

Aviation Week's Check 6 Podcast

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Aviation Week's Check 6 Podcast

## Participants

- **Robert Wall** (None)
- **Steve Trimble** (None)
- **Brian Everstine** (Aviation Week Network)

## Transcript

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Welcome to Check 6. Today we'll head back to one of our two anchor themes this year for our defense episode, Collaborative Combat Aircraft. After Steve Trimble and I spent some time at the ILA Berlin Airshow and also at Euro Saturday talking with folks about the topic, largely folks on Europe, the Pentagon has forced us to gaze back at the U.S. market. U.S. Air Force has now awarded two CCA production contracts to Anderil and General Atomics.

To help lay out what happened and what comes next and where we go from here, I'm joined by Brian Everstein, our Pentagon editor, and again, Steve, our senior defense editor. I'm Robert Wall, Aviation Week's executive editor for Defense in Space. So, Brian, let's start with you. Anderil and GA were effectively the incumbents flying their demonstrators under their Phase 1 contracts. Now they've got these follow-on awards. What should we know about them? What's important? Anything that surprised you? Was it surprising they even won?

There were a couple things that did stand out to me, but I would not say that them both winning really did. I think this is something that had been previewed really since the onset of CCA Increment 1. Air Force officials had repeatedly said that they could and likely would award contracts to both of them. But it was officially a downselect because as part of the Increment 1 process, the Air Force went back to the regular original pool of potential vendors for a re-solicitation.

So that meant that Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman had a chance to come back with their designs and compete again for this production decision. And there was some progress that we saw on this. For example, Northrop Grumman came out and very publicly showed what they are working on, their YFQ-48A. But the Air Force, in a briefing us this week on it, said that Anderil and General Atomics proved themselves. They proved themselves that they are the best option for the Air Force to meet both their schedule and their cost goals,

which both are pretty much classified at the moment. So we don't know how many air vehicles the two companies will build. We don't know how much money that they are getting. Just that they are beating the Air Force's original goal of having one CCA cost less than one third of that of an F-35. So the two prototypes, the YFQ-42A and the YFQ-44A are still flying. Anderil is deployed to Beale Air...

What's Next For CCAs After U.S. Air Force Downselect?

Transcript

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What's Next For CCAs After U.S. Air Force Downselect?

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.