Here's how Palmer Luckey's Anduril wants to beat General Atomics for the US Air Force's next big bet
Anduril is competing with General Atomics for the US Air Force's drone wingman program.
The startup says it's designed its drone, Fury, with commercial parts like a business jet engine.
The Air Force has cited the project as a way to bring "affordable mass" to its aerial missions.
Anduril Industries has revealed new details on how it plans to keep costs down for the US Air Force as it competes with defense heavyweight General Atomics for the drone wingman program.
The defense startup, cofounded by Palmer Luckey, was featured in a CBS "60 Minutes" segment on Sunday. During the segment, Anduril's CEO, Brian Schimpf, said the firm designed its AI-powered fighter jet, Fury, to be built from commercial parts to make manufacturing easier.
"We tried to eliminate really every bottleneck we could find around what makes an aircraft hard to produce," said Schimpf.
Schimpf said the Fury's designers, for example, chose to go with a commercial business jet engine instead of a military one.
The Warzone reported in 2023 that the Fury was designed with a Williams International FJ44-4M turbofan engine, which is popular in light business jets such as those in the Cessna Citation Series. Anduril didn't say in the Sunday CBS segment if the Fury still uses the same engine.
Schimpf also said that the Fury avoids "very exquisite, big aircraft landing gear" in favor of a simpler model.
"We designed it so that it can be built in any machine shop in America," he said of the landing gear.
"We've designed nearly every part of this that can be made in hundreds of different places within the US from lots of different suppliers," Schimpf added.
The Fury, designated YFQ-44A by the Air Force, is Anduril's bid to win the Pentagon's Collaborative Combat Aircraft contract, which seeks to build large autonomous or semi-autonomous drones that can fly in tandem with piloted advanced fighter jets for Next Generation Air Dominance.
The service wants these new aircraft to be much cheaper than regular fighter jets. Gen. David Allvin, the Air Force Chief of Staff, said in November that the purpose of the drone wingman program was to bring "affordable mass" to aerial missions.
It's a priority that reflects mounting concerns in the US that the American military could run out of weapons and ammo in a matter of weeks or even days if it were to go to war with a rival such as China.
Now, the Air Force says the drone wingman program is a core part of its mandate to recalibrate itself for near-peer conflict.
Frank Kendall, who served as Air Force Secretary until January, said he'd accelerated plans to develop Collaborative Combat Aircraft when analyses showed the drones would "change air warfare in some very fundamental ways."
Anduril was one of two contractors selected to be the drone project's lead in April 2024, meaning it already beat Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to reach this phase of development.
General Atomics, which manufactures the MQ-9 Reaper and MQ-1 Predator, has also billed its offering — the XQ-67A — as a "low-cost, modular" uncrewed system.
Both companies' prototypes were shown on May 1 at California's Beale Air Force Base, which Allvin said would be the home site for initial testing and assessments. The Air Force is expected to make early selection decisions in its fiscal year of 2026, which starts in October.
Anduril and General Atomics did not respond to comment requests sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
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