USAF and GE’s XQ-67A OBSS drone has taken its maiden flight

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) has announced that its XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station (OBSS) has completed its maiden flight. Conducted at General Atomics’ Gray Butte test facility in California on February 28, this is an important milestone in developing this new unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

The XQ-67A OBSS is a Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) program that General Atomics were commissioned to design and build in 2021. The United States Air Force (USAF) sees the OBSS as a crucial step towards advanced drone concepts, with a focus on scalable iterative and “attritability” (aka sacrificial) development, and low-cost rapid production.

The XQ-67A’s design features a broadly splayed V-tail, low-sweep main wing, top-mounted dorsal engine intake, and retractable tricycle landing gear. The XQ-67A is reportedly being designed to fight alongside manned fighter jets such as the F-22 “Raptor” and F-35 “Lightning II.”

In this role, it would extend the surveillance capabilities and operational efficiency of these jets without requiring additional crewed aircraft. Especially considering the cost of time and money to train human pilots. Not to mention avoiding the loss of human life in combat.

XQ-67A is the first of its “kind”
However, it is likely that the XQ-67A will not just be limited to reconnaissance, with variants likely being able to serve as a test platform for experimentation and evaluation by test pilots and operations planners. It is also likely that future variants could be designed to act as “attritable” loyal wingmen, like the MQ-28A “Ghost Bat” currently in development by Boeing.

With this important test, General Atomics has, it says, validated the “genus/species” concept first developed with AFRL as part of the Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Platform Sharing (LCAAPS) program. This focuses on building several aircraft variants from a common core chassis with the flight of the AFRL-funded XQ-67A.

While not specifically mentioned, XQ-67A likely forms part of the United States “Replicator” program that will hopefully see mass-produced autonomous weapons, like drones, to counter issues like China’s rapid militarization. Currently, it is unclear which systems the “Replicator” will create and what missions they will undertake, but the XQ-67A with its “genus” and “species” model would certainly fit the bill.

AFRL and General Atomics collaborated under LCAAPS to develop a foundational core architecture, called “genus,” that can be used to build multiple aircraft “species.”

The first of many to come
“This provides an alternative acquisition approach for military aircraft that enables faster development, lower costs, and more opportunities for frequent technology refresh,” said Trenton White, OBSS Program Manager and aerospace engineer in AFRL’s Aerospace Systems Directorate.

“XQ-67A is the first “species” to be designed and built from this shared platform. Flight demonstration of this system is a major first step toward showing the ability to produce affordable combat mass,” he added.

“OBSS is the first aircraft type built and flown using a common core chassis developed by GA-ASI that promotes commonality across multiple vehicle types,” said GA-ASI Vice President of Advanced Programs Michael Atwood.

As The War Zone points out, the first flight of OBSS marks a significant step towards the USAF’s vision of an air combat inventory increasingly dominated by advanced unmanned systems.