On April 17, Northrop Grumman’s YFQ-48A TALON BLUE, a prototype the company has developed in-house to pursue Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) opportunities, completed its first engine start. It was confirmed in the occasion that the engine selected for NG’s aircraft is “a member of Pratt & Whitney's PW500 engine family”.

The two firms worked in close collaboration on engine requirements and integration, and carried out extensive testing to “expand the commercial limits of the PW500”, leading to “favorable” results in terms of thrust, range and operability in CCA context.

Leveraging commercial technology was seen as crucial to balance costs and keep development times down. By working on the PW500, the Firms had a backlog of more than 24.5 million flight hours and related evidence to build upon.

Interestingly, Pratt & Whitney mentions in its own press release that, in addition to domestic pursuits, it is also “on contract with an international customer and discussing additional opportunities with airframers”.

The YFQ-48A TALON BLUE is part of Project TALON, Northrop Grumman’s portfolio approach for producing modular, cost-efficient, and swiftly deployable aircraft. The designation YFQ-48A was officially assigned by the USAF in December 2025 as the Mission Design Series for the prototype, although TALON BLUE is not currently part of the Air Force’s CCA program of record, currently limited to Anduril’s 44A and GA-ASI’s 42A.

Flight testing for TALON BLUE will follow in the near future. In the meanwhile, Northrop Grumman is using a surrogate platform, the “Talon IQ” Model 437 aircraft by Northrop Grumman‘s Scaled Composites, to fly experimental missions to validate the Artificial Intelligence core. Test flights have already been completed with NG’s own Prism software and with the Hivemind software by Shield AI as well.

In a flight at the beginning of the month, the TALON IQ switched in flight between Prism and Hivemind AI cores, using Hivemind to “execute combat air patrol and target engagement maneuvers”.

RTX‘s Collins Aerospace and Shield AI are providing the software for the General Atomics YFQ-42A CCA prototype and the Anduril Industries YFQ-44A CCA prototype respectively, under the USAF’s Autonomy Government Reference Architecture approach to adapt vendor agnostic software easily into major weapons systems.

The selection between the Anduril and GA-ASI candidates for CCA Increment 1 is expected this year. Northrop Grumman has its sight on the next phase, Increment 2, which will open the door to new candidate aircraft. Some 9 companies are understood to be candidates for Increment 2: the USAF said at the end of 2025 that it was awarding 9 early stage contracts to as many companies but did not identify them.

Northrop Grumman is one of them. CCA Increment 2 is expected to have a greater focus on air to ground operations, since Inc 1 is targeting air to air.

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