Top Aces explores uncrewed adversary aircraft for training role

Top Aces is studying how to fold the threat posed by new uncrewed tactical aircraft into its adversary air training, according to Aaron Steffens, the company's vice-president of adversary air business development. The Montreal-based provider has given the concept a tentative name: collaborative adversary aircraft, or CAA, a term it says it coined.

Steffens, a former US Air Force squadron commander and Lockheed Martin F-16 pilot, said the idea is at an early stage but fits into Top Aces' longer-term development plan. The name echoes the collaborative combat aircraft, or CCA, programmes under way at US and European defence companies to supply uncrewed wingmen for conventional fighters.

The US Air Force has awarded initial contracts for the General Atomics FQ-42 and the Anduril Industries FQ-44, and plans to field at least 500 of the jets for air-to-air combat support missions. Top Aces has built a method of replicating the threat from fifth-generation fighters, and Steffens said it is looking to do the same for CCAs.

What the solution will look like is still undecided. Steffens said it will be some kind of uncrewed aircraft rather than a reconfigured conventional fighter, noting that certain attributes can be built into an unmanned vehicle that cannot be obtained from an older ex-military airframe. A future collaborative adversary aircraft could fly itself, as the FQ-42 and FQ-44 are designed to do, or be remotely piloted, as with the General Atomics MQ-9 and MQ-20.

Top Aces has fitted its F-16s with a proprietary Advanced Aggressor Mission System, which the company says allows the fourth-generation jets to offer a credible challenge to fifth-generation aircraft such as the Lockheed Martin F-35.