MOJAVE, Calif. — Northrop Grumman has unveiled a new autonomous combat drone known as Project Talon, with an eye toward dramatically lowering the price point and speeding up the development and manufacture of large uncrewed aircraft.
The first iteration of the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program saw Northrop submitting a design proposal that got high marks for technical performance, but with lower scores in affordability and price that resulted in the company failing to win one of the two contact awards, said Tom Jones, president of Northrop’s aeronautics systems division, during the reveal of the aircraft to media today.
With Project Talon, the goal was to rectify those mistakes.
“The idea was to see if we could build an aircraft that had all the same capability of our original offering, and do it faster,” he said. “So the outcome was an aircraft, but the [more important] outcome we’re shooting for was the process. How do we design and build things that perform at a high level, but that we can build quickly now and can do affordably?”
All told, it took 15 months for Northrop and its Scaled Composites subsidiary to take Project Talon from project authorization to “weight on wheels,” the milestone where an aircraft is fully supported by its landing gear for the first time. First flight of the aircraft is targeted to occur within two years of Project Talon’s inception, Jones said, a timeline that would roughly correspond to next fall.
“Not only did the team beat the affordability targets that we gave them, but we actually have an aircraft that has better performance and a number of key areas that our original offering did,” he said.
Northrop executives for the most part declined to get into the specifics on the secret sauce that made the Project Talon drone cheaper to produce. They also refused to talk about the aircraft’s performance specifications, design specifics like its engine, or its cost.
However, one key enabler was lowering the aircraft’s weight and the number of parts used to build it, with Northrop estimating that the Project Talon drone is about 1,000 pounds lighter with a fully composite structure and 50 percent fewer parts than its CCA increment one offering. That also equated to a 30 percent faster construction time when compared to the increment one design, the company said.
Another critical factor, Jones said, was bringing in a joint team of Northrop and Scaled Composite engineers to develop and build Project Talon, which resulted in a more flexible design methodology that was able to make performance tradeoffs in the pursuit keeping on cost and schedule. This contrasted with CCA increment one, which used a “traditional Northrop Grumman approach,” Jones said.
“You need that exquisiteness in some things. But the whole concept behind collaborative combat aircraft, it’s all about affordable mass, which means you need to keep the cost down,” he said. “And then the other thing is, because you would use affordable mass ostensibly in a war of attrition, you’re going to lose these. So not only do you want it to be affordable, you want to be able to replenish that mass at rate. So, the ability to rapidly manufacture something” becomes important.
Project Talon was not designed to be the company’s offering for second iteration of the Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) program, Jones said, and the executive was careful to not commit that the company would be submitting the design for CCA. However, he didn’t rule it out as an option, and Jones stated that there is interest in the drone across multiple US services as well as some international customers, some of whom have already traveled to Mojave to see the aircraft in person.
‘Project Lotus’ Into ‘Project Talon’
While the event in Mojave is Northrop’s first public acknowledgement of Project Talon, the aviation community has been abuzz with speculation about the new aircraft since October, when Aviation Week first disclosed its existence under its former name “Project Lotus.” (Jones confirmed Project Talon was the same aircraft referenced in the story.)
The report, which did not feature a photo of the drone, described elements of its design such as a “long, slender fuselage positioned forward of the leading edges of the wings,” “[an] inlet [that] sits high atop of the extreme aft section of its fuselage,” and “sharply canted tails.”
In a later report, The War Zone noted that a fuselage section of an aircraft that appeared in a Northrop promotional video didn’t not appear to correspond with any of the company’s known designs and speculated that it could be associated with Project Lotus.
As the Air Force looks to the second round of its CCA competition — with the intent to award “concept refinement contracts” in early fiscal 2026 — Northrop is not the only defense aerospace firms developing new drones that could serve as potential offerings.
In September, Lockheed Martin’s secretive Skunk Works advanced development division announced it was building the first prototype of a stealthy combat drone called Vectis, with a first flight planned for 2027. Lockheed executives who spoke to reporters then demurred when asked if the drone was the company’s offering for the second phase of the Air Force’s CCA competition, but didn’t rule it out.
Dave Alexander, president of General Atomics’ aeronautics division, told Breaking Defense in September that the “Longshot” drone it’s developing under a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract could be a “great fit” for Increment 2 depending on how the Air Force’s requirements ultimately shake out.
Shield AI, which is competing to provide the autonomy core for the Air Force’s CCA program, in October announced its X-BAT concept for a stealthy, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) drone.