Anduril rolled the first Ohio-built Fury off the line on July 27, pushing the FQ-44A from design and testing into factory production just weeks after the Department of the Air Force ordered it and another uncrewed fighter into production. The move matters because the aircraft that was meant to imitate an enemy in training is now being built as a combat drone.
The timing is what gives the story its weight. The service moved the two aircraft into production on June 17, and Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said the contracts back a plan to buy over 150 combat capable CCA by the end of the decade, with the eventual goal around 1,000. The FQ series, assigned in 2025, is the first fighter-drone designation the Air Force has ever issued, turning a program once described in prototypes into something the service is now trying to buy in numbers that would have seemed unlikely only a few years ago.
General Atomics’ FQ-42A Dark Merlin and Anduril’s FQ-44A Fury were still carrying Y designations until June, when they were shifted from development status into real manufacturing. General Atomics named its aircraft in February, using the dark merlin, a small falcon that ambushes other birds in flight and hunts cooperatively in groups. David R. Alexander captured the bird’s reputation in a line that fit the new aircraft too neatly: “They harass other falcons for fun, and they eat what they kill.”
Anduril’s path is the more striking one. The Fury airframe began at Blue Force Technologies under the names Grackle and then REDmedium, and its original purpose was to imitate a modern adversary fighter during training. Anduril bought Blue Force Technologies in September 2023, and the aircraft that emerged from that purchase is now being built in Ohio at Arsenal-1, in Pickaway County near Rickenbacker International Airport. The first production airframe rolled out of a factory that did not exist two years ago.
The friction in the program is hard to miss: the Fury was built to play the enemy, but it is now the one doing the shooting. One of the two uncrewed fighters fired a missile over the Mojave at a target that existed only in software, while both aircraft were also deployed to a base in the Nevada desert with weapons hanging off the wings. That makes the test more than a demo. It shows the CCA program moving from a concept that once borrowed from training to a fleet the Air Force wants to arm, buy fast and field in numbers.
What comes next is larger production, not another unveiling. The Air Force has flown armed drones for a quarter of a century, but none were bought by the hundred to go looking for other aircraft. With the first Ohio-built Fury already off the line and the Dark Merlin and Fury now carrying FQ designations, the next question is no longer whether the program exists. It is how quickly the service can turn two new names into the hundreds it says it wants before the decade ends.
