Meink names FQ-42A "Vengeance," FQ-44A "Fury"

The ceremony is the Air Force putting a name on an idea it has pursued for years: pairing full-size but uncrewed stealthy Collaborative Combat Aircraft with piloted fighter jets. The piloted jets would control the drones and send them on riskier missions, keeping pilots out of harm's way. Three months ago the service awarded General Atomics and Anduril prototype contracts and gave the drones numbers, FQ-42 and FQ-44. Now they have names, and the Secretary of the Air Force has sketched the path past prototyping.

The numbers around the program are where the story splits in two. The hardware contract is one part; additional funds are set aside for the software that lets the drones fly autonomously and for other software, presumably to operate sensors, communications and weapons. Anduril has already won a separate, unspecified-value autonomy software contract and sits on a shortlist of six bidders for other software work, so its eventual take is not fixed by the hardware side alone.

What the naming actually changes is mostly the frame around that uncertainty: the program now has a public identity and a stated scale, with 150 drones in "Increment 1" and 500 by 2032. Whether Anduril captures the larger share of that, or general Atomics does, will hinge on whether the Fury prototype pans out and on how those software awards fall. For a private company, a clearer production path appears to be the kind of outcome that strengthens the case for an IPO, though the article leaves the final figures unresolved.