NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — With no sight of a fiscal 2027 defense budget until December at earliest, Anduril officials are warning that production work on FQ-44 Fury drones won’t be able to commence until funding is approved by Congress.
In June, the Air Force awarded production contracts to Anduril and General Atomics to build the service’s first round of Collaborative Combat Aircraft.
But while Anduril has invested its own funds into building a new production facility and started buying items with long lead times, it will need Congress to pass FY27 appropriations before it can start work on the FQ-44 Fury, said Erin Simpson, Anduril’s vice president for strategy execution.
“What we communicate to the Air Force is that we have invested and have gone as far as we can,” she told reporters Monday at the Association for Air and Space Forces conference. “We will not have a cold start to start production in [20]27. We will have assets rolling through. That said, even a company like ours can only do so much without procurement dollars.”
Earlier this month, Congress passed a continuing resolution (CR) that will keep the government funded when the new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1. The CR holds government spending at FY26 levels through Dec. 11, and restricts the Defense Department’s ability to start work on new programs.
However, if Congress is unable to pass a budget in December and instead opts to approve another funding stopgap to allow additional time for negotiations, Simpson raised the possibility the future CR could include an anomaly — or funding exemption — that would allow it to start work on the CCA production contract.
“We are very happy and have been working very closely with the Air Force. Whatever they need from us to help make that case, we are ready to turn dollars into airplanes, and whatever we can do to help that make that happen, we want to do,” she said.
During a Monday speech at the conference, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the service now expects 500 CCA drones will be in service by 2032. He did not specify how many of those drones might come from the CCA program’s first “increment,” or how many may be drawn from successive development rounds.
Both the service and the companies building the first round of CCAs have declined to disclose how many aircraft will be built under the June production contracts.
Anduril’s Arsenal-1 facility outside Columbus, Ohio, can produce as many as 150 Fury aircraft per year, Jason Levin, the company’s senior vice president of engineering, said on Monday. He added that the Air Force’s current orders do not yet reach that threshold.
While Anduril awaits FY27 dollars to start producing FQ-44 drones early next year, it is currently building Fury prototypes — known as YFQ-44 — at Arsenal-1, Levin said. The company is the first of the two CCA builders to deliver a prototype to the Air Force’s Experimental Operations Unit (EOU), which is building the playbook for how the service will operate CCAs in the future.
In July, the Air Force disclosed that the YFQ-44 was the first CCA to conduct a successful live fire test of a munition, in this case an AMRAAM air-to air-missile. In the wake of that test, Anduril has begun integrating other munitions using its own internal funding, including 500-pound guided bombs, small diameter bombs and low-cost cruise missiles such as the company’s Barracuda 500, Levin said.
“We’ve also looked at other air-to-air weapons, as well as begun integration on rocket pods and targeting pods, so we can perform other missions, whether it’s counter-UAS, counter-cruise missile, or you know air-to-ground or air-to-surface strike,” he said.
Anduril has also been supporting the EOU as it conducts additional Fury tests at Creech Air Force Base, Nev., Levin said.
“We basically just like upped the ante to do more complex things,” Levin said.
“We did a hot reload,” he said. “Basically, they left the engine of YFQ-44 running [and] two EOU personnel were able to swap out the AMRAAM, the AIM-120, very quickly with the engine running. This got them down from doing sorties where you would spend hours between, where now they were down to minutes in between.”
In other tests, Air Force operators launched and recovered the aircraft on their own, and flew the aircraft using the mission autonomy software without Anduril personnel assisting.
The Fury has flown in formation with F-35s, but Anduril has also begun “quarterback integration” with manned fighter jets, where that manned fighter would be able to control the drone from a tablet, Levin said.
“We’ve already begun doing quarterback integration in our hardware-in-the-loop environments, and our software-in-the-loop environments, and even on the aircraft itself,” he said. “Most of those events will be coming up here in a matter of weeks or months, [where] you’ll see the first quarterback integration with Fury.”
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