General Atomics FQ-42 CCA Drone Production Ramp Up To Be Boosted By Boeing Subsidiary

By Joseph Trevithick

Published Oct 23, 2026 4:39 PM EDT

General Atomics has tapped Spirit Defense, a subsidiary of Boeing, to help produce FQ-42A Vengeance Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones. This follows the U.S. Air Force’s announcement last month that it wants to have at least 500 CCAs in inventory by 2032 . Years ago, TWZ highlighted the likelihood that industrial partnerships like this would be required to meet the service’s aggressive volume and schedule goals for the CCA program.

General Atomics’ Aeronautical Systems, Inc. division (GA-ASI) announced the team-up with Spirit on FQ-42 production earlier today. The Vengenace is one of two designs the Air Force has ordered into production under the first phase, or Increment 1, of its CCA program. The other is Anduril’s FQ-44A Fury . The 500-drone target the Air Force has laid out covers a mixed fleet of both FQ-42s and FQ-44s. The service is still planning to acquire additional CCAs, potentially with completely different designs, through a follow-on Increment 2 .

A FQ-42A Vengeance CCA drone. GA-ASI

When it comes to FQ-42 production, “Spirit Defense’s role as a fuselage design-build partner brings together the company’s engineering and advanced manufacturing capabilities to support the program from design through production,” according to a GA-ASI release . “Partnering with Spirit Defense is a strength multiplier for the company and the nation, offering manufacturing capacity and industrial depth to scale CCA production faster, while strengthening production resilience, and reducing the risk of single points of failure.”

“We’re excited to be working with Spirit Defense,” David R. Alexander, GA-ASI’s President, said in an accompanying statement. “We’ve established our proven design, development, and manufacturing capability for the FQ-42. With Spirit Defense, we add capacity, which is exactly the kind of production resilience our U.S. Air Force customer is looking for with its CCA ramp-up. This kind of partnership represents the scalable industrial base the Air Force and the U.S. Department of War are looking for from industry.”

“The intent for them [the Air Force] is to go up to as many as 500 aircraft by 2032,” Mike Shortsleeve, Vice President for Strategy Business Development at GA-ASI, also told TWZ ’s Jamie Hunter on the floor of the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference in September. “We’re ready to do that production.”

At the conference, Shortsleeve highlighted investments in additive manufacturing and advanced robotics, along with efforts to build out the company’s skilled workforce, to help meet those production demands.

General Atomics is already an established drone maker with significant serial airframe production experience of its own. At the same time, the company is seeing growing demand for its MQ-9B series of drones, including a sale to the U.S. Coast Guard announced earlier this month. The MQ-9B design builds on the highly successful MQ-9A Reaper . It is also pursuing a host of other opportunities in the U.S. and abroad that could add production demands.

Mike Atwood, GA-ASI’s Vice President of Advanced Aircraft Programs, notably acknowledged potential hurdles for meeting CCA production demands, specifically, in the past.

“We have basically a hot production line where I can take an MQ-9 out and put a Collaborative Combat Aircraft in,” Atwood said on an edition of The Merge podcast back in 2024. “We were able to essentially take Reaper parts out of stock rooms and build the first [CCA] aircraft.”

An MQ-9 Reaper drone. General Atomics (General Atomics)

“Composites are inherently expensive … they’re really for high-performance applications where you need certain strength and stiffness,” he also noted at that time. “When you look at Collaborative Combat Aircraft … we’re actually falling back on more metallic – what we call hybrid structures, metal frames with composite skins.”

The production of advanced composites and hybrid structures is Spirit’s main business . The company also has a well-established history of working as a subcontractor on military aerospace projects, including in support of bleed-edge programs like the B-21 Raider bomber .

It is also important to note here that, before its founding as an independent company in 2005, Spirit was actually a division of Boeing. By the early 2020s, Spirit had been suffering from significant financial losses and quality control lapses . Boeing subsequently decided to reacquire it in a multi-billion-dollar deal. The acquisition process began in 2024 and was finalized last year. Since then, Boeing has faced continued challenges in getting the firm back on track.

In 2024, when General Atomics and Anduril were selected to move ahead in the Increment 1 phase of the Air Force’s CCA program, TWZ explicitly raised the prospect of both companies bringing in help, especially to meet future production demands. At the time, the focus was more on Anduril, which was not a major airframer at the time and had yet to establish significant production facilities of its own for Fury. It was also unclear then whether the Air Force might pick a single winning Increment 1 drone rather than go the route it ultimately chose of ordering batches of both designs.

A Fury drone seen at Anduril’s Arsenal-1 production facility in Ohio. Anduril

However, as we wrote at the time: “No matter who is selected in the end as the prime contractor, a large pool of manufacturer partners will likely be key to meeting the Air Force’s production volume and schedule goals.”

As an aside, Boeing is already in the CCA business itself, with the MQ-28 Ghost Bat developed originally through a separate subsidary in Australia. The company has been working to expand its own production capacity to build those drones in recent years.

Generally speaking, the ability of defense contractors to rapidly scale production to meet U.S. military demands, and do so affordably , is steadily becoming a more common point of discussion across all major acquisition programs. Being able to acquire and field CCAs in relatively large volumes and at a price that makes sense is absolutely central to the whole concept being these drones .

“The nuance here that probably is overlooked, is the fact that they’re [the Air Force] recognizing with 500 that they require, the factory floor is now becoming part of the battle space,” General Atomics’ Shortsleeve had told TWZ at the AFA conference last month. “So the ability for companies to be able to manufacture and produce those aircraft in numbers that are needed for the fight rapidly is going to be a key part to going forward in the future.”

The Air Force is otherwise still very much laying the rest of the groundwork for fielding its future CCAs operationally toward the end of the decade. A full playbook for deploying, launching, recovering, supporting, and otherwise operating CCA-type drones on a day-to-day basis, let alone employing them tactically , still has yet to be written. Answering these questions will be important for other CCA programs across the U.S. military and elsewhere globally.

A Vengeance drone seen flying in formation with an F-35 fighter during a test flight. USAF

General Atomics’ new partnership with Spirit Defense underscores how production of Increment 1 CCAs is ramping up already in reponse to the Air Force’s current CCA program goals.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

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作者：约瑟夫·特雷维西克

发布于美国东部时间2026年10月23日下午4:39

通用原子公司已委托波音公司旗下子公司Spirit Defense协助生产FQ-42A“复仇”协同作战无人机（CCA）。此前，美国空军上月宣布，计划到2032年至少拥有500架CCA无人机。多年前，TWZ就曾指出，要实现空军在CCA项目上雄心勃勃的产量和进度目标，很可能需要此类工业合作。

通用原子公司旗下的航空系统公司（GA-ASI）今天早些时候宣布与Spirit公司合作生产FQ-42无人机。FQ-42是空军在其CCA项目第一阶段（或称“增量1”）订购的两款无人机之一，另一款是Anduril公司的FQ-44A“狂怒”。空军设定的500架无人机目标涵盖了FQ-42和FQ-44的混合机队。空军仍计划通过后续的“增量2”项目采购更多CCA无人机，这些无人机可能采用完全不同的设计。

一架 FQ-42A 复仇 CCA 无人机。 GA-ASI

通用航空航空航天系统公司（GA-ASI）发布的消息称，在FQ-42的生产方面，“Spirit Defense作为机身设计制造合作伙伴，整合了公司的工程技术和先进制造能力，为该项目从设计到生产的整个过程提供支持。” “与Spirit Defense的合作对公司和国家而言都是一次倍增器，它提供了制造能力和工业深度，可以更快地扩大CCA（通用航空零部件组件）的生产规模，同时增强生产的韧性，并降低单点故障的风险。”

通用航空系统公司（GA-ASI）总裁大卫·R·亚历山大在随附的声明中表示：“我们很高兴能与Spirit Defense公司合作。我们已经建立了成熟的FQ-42设计、开发和制造能力。通过与Spirit Defense的合作，我们增加了产能，这正是我们的美国空军客户在CCA项目加速推进过程中所需要的生产韧性。这种合作关系代表了空军和美国战争部所寻求的可扩展的工业基础。”

“空军的目标是到2032年将飞机数量增加到500架，”通用航空系统公司（GA-ASI）战略业务发展副总裁迈克·肖特斯利夫在9月份举行的2026年空军与航天部队协会（AFA）航空航天网络大会上告诉TWZ的杰米·亨特，“我们已经准备好进行生产。”

在会议上，Shortsleeve重点介绍了公司在增材制造和先进机器人技术方面的投资，以及为满足生产需求而努力培养公司熟练员工队伍的情况。

通用原子公司本身就是一家成熟的无人机制造商，拥有丰富的批量机身生产经验。与此同时，该公司MQ-9B系列无人机的需求也在不断增长，包括本月初宣布向美国海岸警卫队出售的订单。MQ-9B的设计基于广受好评的MQ-9A“死神”无人机。此外，该公司还在美国和海外积极寻求其他机遇，这些机遇可能会增加生产需求。

通用航空航天公司 (GA-ASI) 先进飞机项目副总裁 Mike Atwood 特别承认，满足 CCA 生产需求可能会遇到一些障碍，尤其是在过去。

“我们基本上有一条快速生产线，我可以把一架 MQ-9 无人机换成一架协同作战飞机，”阿特伍德在 2024 年的 The Merge 播客节目中说道。“我们基本上可以从仓库里取出 Reaper 无人机的零件，然后制造出第一架 [CCA] 飞机。”

MQ-9“死神”无人机。通用原子公司（General Atomics）

“复合材料本身就很昂贵……它们实际上只适用于需要特定强度和刚度的高性能应用，”他当时还指出。“就协同作战飞机而言……我们实际上更多地采用金属材料——我们称之为混合结构，即金属框架搭配复合材料蒙皮。”

生产先进复合材料和混合结构是Spirit公司的主营业务。该公司在军事航空航天项目方面也拥有丰富的分包经验，包括为B-21“突袭者”轰炸机等尖端项目提供支持。

值得注意的是，Spirit在2005年独立运营之前，实际上是波音公司的一个部门。到了2020年代初期，Spirit遭受了严重的财务亏损和质量控制问题。随后，波音决定以数十亿美元的价格将其重新收购。收购流程于2024年启动，并于去年完成。自那以后，波音在帮助Spirit重回正轨方面一直面临着诸多挑战。

2024年，通用原子公司和安杜里尔公司被选中参与空军CCA项目的第一阶段研发时，TWZ明确提出两家公司可能会寻求其他方面的帮助，尤其是在满足未来生产需求方面。当时，人们的关注点更多地集中在安杜里尔公司身上，因为该公司当时并非大型无人机制造商，也尚未建立起足以生产“狂怒”无人机的规模化生产设施。此外，当时也不清楚空军是否会选择一款中标的第一阶段无人机，而不是像最终那样同时订购两种型号的无人机。

一架“狂怒”无人机出现在安杜里尔公司位于俄亥俄州的“军械库-1”生产基地。安杜里尔

然而，正如我们当时所写：“无论最终选择谁作为主承包商，拥有大量的制造商合作伙伴对于实现空军的生产量和进度目标都至关重要。”

顺便一提，波音公司本身也涉足CCA（巡航控制）领域，其MQ-28“幽灵蝙蝠”无人机最初是由其位于澳大利亚的一家子公司开发的。近年来，该公司一直在努力扩大自身的产能，以生产这类无人机。

总的来说，国防承包商能否迅速扩大生产规模以满足美国军方需求，并控制成本，正逐渐成为所有主要采购项目中日益普遍的讨论焦点。能够以合理的价格相对大量地采购和部署CCA无人机，对于这些无人机的整个概念而言至关重要。

通用原子公司的肖特斯利夫上个月在AFA会议上告诉TWZ：“这里可能被忽略的细微差别是，空军意识到他们需要500架飞机，这意味着工厂车间现在已经成为战场的一部分。因此，企业能否迅速制造和生产出满足作战需求数量的飞机，将是未来发展的关键。”

空军目前仍在为本十年末期未来作战部署CCA无人机奠定基础。一套完整的CCA无人机日常部署、发射、回收、支援及其他操作规范，更遑论战术运用，尚未制定完成。解答这些问题对于美国军方乃至全球其他地区的CCA项目都至关重要。

一架复仇者无人机在试飞中与一架F-35战斗机编队飞行。美国空军

通用原子公司与Spirit Defense公司建立的新合作关系凸显了第一阶段CCA的生产正在加速推进，以响应空军当前的CCA计划目标。

联系作者：joe@twz.com

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