Our Joseph Trevithick spent the day with Northrop Grumman and its subsidiary Scaled Composites at Mojave Air And Space Port to get the first look at the company’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) demonstrator, dubbed Project Talon.
The company says Talon has been in the works for 15 months and they are targeting another nine months till its first flight. The aircraft was designed based on lessons learned from Increment One of the USAF’s CCA program, which Northrop Grumman lost to General Atomics and Anduril. Both of those aircraft, the YFQ-42 and YFQ-44 are now flying, with the service’s Increment Two of the program fast approaching on the horizon.
Northrop Grumman says Talon is “cheaper and better” and “significantly different” than what it offered for Increment One. The firm’s Increment One design was on the higher performance and capability end of the spectrum, but also at a higher cost than Talon. The goal with Project Talon was to make something with as close to similar performance as possible, but at a lower cost. The resulting design is superior in some aspects, according to Northrop Grumman. Still, this new aircraft isn’t necessarily targeted at Increment Two, with company officials saying there is already high interest from the services and foreign buyers in Talon.
While not fully missionized in its current form, Talon can be adapted to a range of roles, based on customer requirements. The program’s engineering is split 50/50 between Northrop Grumman and Scaled Composites. The company’s Prism autonomy package — which works as the brain and command and control capability for the aircraft — is already flying on the firm’s Beacon demonstrator. Talon also leveraged the latest in digital design tools that Northrop Grumman has in their quiver to achieve rapid development and maximized capabilities.
The arrival of this design comes not long after Lockheed Martin unveiled its Vectis drone, that can be used in the CCA role. Other competitors are also very active in the space, including Boeing already flying its MQ-28 for instance, as well as General Atomics and Anduril which are already producing aircraft under Increment One of the CCA initiative.
Many more details to come, we will be updating this post shortly, but as of now, Northrop Grumman has firmly thrown its hat in the CCA ring in a very public manner with Talon.
UPDATE: Design and Features
What we are seeing in the image released and from seeing the aircraft in person is that it takes on a relatively familiar form, featuring a lambda wing, v-tail, dorsal trapezoid-shaped inlet, and shovel-shaped nose. It also has a chine-line edge that runs across the nose. Sawtooth-edged and trapezoidal panels are seen around the aircraft. It has a round, semi-recessed exhaust for its single turbofan engine located between the tails. The drone is clearly optimized with low-observable (stealthy) characteristics especially from the critical forward aspect.
The bottom isn’t flat and has a large sawtooth edged panel, which could be a weapons bay (likely the case) but that was not officially confirmed by the company. The drone has three air data probes jutting out of its shovel nose, which is relatively common for this kind of configuration at this point in its development. Three small domed antennas dot the aircraft’s forward upper fuselage and another atop the intake, as well what appear to be four canted vertical aerials. Widely spaced single-tire main gear under the wing that retracts inward is also seen. A small aperture below the nose is also present, which could feature a camera for flight testing and general navigational use.
The general resemblance to General Atomics’ YFQ-42 is undeniable, although there are major differences in the details and especially in the wing design. In fact, the aircraft looks more like the company’s XQ-67 demonstrator, which helped inform the YFQ-42, than anything else. It’s also worth noting that the FAA’s registration for the aircraft, which carries the n-number N444LX, shows it as Model 444, which follows historically with designation naming of Scaled Composites aircraft.
UPDATE: Additional Details
Northrop Grumman and Scaled Composites are not yet providing detailed specifications about the Project Talon design. However, it has been disclosed that the drone has a lower detailed part count and an approximately 50 percent reduction in total parts, overall, compared to Northrop Grumman’s Increment One CCA design. It is also approximately 1,000 pounds lighter and 30 percent faster to produce, in part due to its fully composite material structure.
One specific detail that was shared is that the Project Talon drone’s landing gear comes from an existing aircraft design, but Northrop Grumman and Scaled Composites declined to say which one. This is a relatively common way to help keep costs and design time low. Scaled Composites does pride itself on designing the landing gear for many of its aircraft in-house.
“There’s not a full ‘digital twin‘ for the aircraft, but digital tools have been used extremely extensively,” Greg Morris, President of Scaled Composites, also noted.
“It’s an optimization question, leveraging each aspect of the process in order to enable you to go as fast as possible,” he added. “Digital environments are amazing for some things. Testing in the physical world is amazing at other things. Marrying the two together gets you the benefits of both.
The Project Talon name is in part a callback to Northrop’s T-38 Talon jet trainer, which was also designed with high performance (and high maneuverability), as well as affordability, in mind.
“And it’s got a cool sound to it, too,” Tom Jones, President of Northrop Grumman’s Aeronautics Systems sector, said during today’s event.
Jones confirmed that Project Talon was originally named Project Lotus, but the reason for the name change has not yet been disclosed. Aviation Week first reported on the existence of Project Lotus in October after the drone was spotted out in the open at Mojave.
“All I can say about what could have happened is we would have had a better offering. I can’t say whether we would have been in or out, right,” Jones said when asked about whether the Project Talon design would have fared better in the Increment One CCA competition.
“I think the debate has been ongoing, [and] continues to rage, on affordability versus performance,” he added at the event in Mojave. “This was an experiment on a new methodology for designing aircraft faster that would enable us to scale manufacturing faster, which we believe is going to be a key requirement.”
“The whole concept behind Collaborative Combat Aircraft, it’s all about affordable mass, which means you need to keep the cost down,” the President of Northrop Grumman’s Aeronautics Systems sector also noted. ”I think the other thing is, because you would use affordable mass ostensibly in war of attrition, you’re going to lose these, so not only do you want it to be affordable, you want to be able to replenish that mass at rate.”
“We need to be able to ramp up manufacturing quickly,” he continued. “This [Project Talon] was built to be produced quickly, not just to be affordable.”
Jones also stressed that he sees Project Talon’s “experiment in new methodology” as one that could have broader impacts across Northrop Grumman.
“The outcome was an aircraft,” he said. “But the outcome we were shooting for was the process. How do we design and build things that perform at a high level, but that we can build quickly and that we can do affordably.”
“I think what we learned is we took a high-side compliant engineering organization and taught them a different way of thinking about innovation. Innovation is not always about the subsystem that performs the highest. Sometimes it is. We’re extremely good at that,” he added. “Sometimes it’s not. In those cases, we’re still extremely good at making something very complex.”
In Mojave today, Northrop Grumman representatives highlighted how much the company spends on internal research and development and other capital investments, which is said to be roughly 40 percent higher than “peer” competitors based on publicly available financial data. As an example, Northrop Grumman has put roughly $1 billion into independent research and development (IRAD) in the past year or so.
“So this [Project Talon] was really about kind of broadening that paradigm to what it means to be a high performing engineering, aviation development, and manufacturing organization – to encompass all aspects of it,” Jones said. “There’s different approaches for different requirements. And I’m really happy with results that we got.”
Contact the author: Tyler@twz.com