General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) has announced on May 21 that its YFQ-42A Collaborative Combat Aircraft has returned to flight testing “following a round of safety reviews and software enhancements”.

GA-ASI had reported on April 6 that one of its YFQ-42A Collaborative Combat Aircraft had experienced in in-flight mishap following take-off from a company-owned airport in the California desert. It has now clarified that the mishap resulted in the total loss of the aircraft, although no one was injured in the incident.

In this period without flights, ground testing and other Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction (TMRR) activities continued without interruption. In the meanwhile, a “thorough safety review” has ascertain that the crash was determined by “an autopilot miscalculation for the weight and center of gravity of the aircraft, prompting a software remediation”.

The review was jointly run with the USAF which has thus been able to follow the process all the way until technical authorities endorsed the software changes.

The aircraft lost in the mishap was “one of several” production-representative YFQ-42A CCAs currently in the technical maturation and risk reduction phase of the program for the US Air Force. These jets fly from the company-owned facilities.

This was the first known flight-related accident involving one of the CCA Increment 1 prototypes. GA-ASI’s YFQ-42A was the first CCA to fly, preceding Anduril’s YFQ-44A by a few months, in 2025. GA-ASI’s aircraft, in a partly different configuration, has actually been flying since February 2024, when it first took off in its XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station variant for another USAF project.

CCA trials are progressing towards employment of air-to-air weapons ahead of a competitive Increment 1 production decision is expected later this year. The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request for the Department of War includes almost a billion dollars in procurement funding for CCAs.

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