A Drone With A Small Bizjet Engine Might Simulate 5th Generation Fighters For Cheap

When F-35 pilots go out to practice intercepting or fighting adversary “Red Air” aircraft, they often end up flying against their squadron mates in other F-35s. It’s not the best or cheapest training but there just aren’t many other 5th generation fighters out there. The Air Force thinks a small North Carolina company could simulate them with an inexpensive drone called Fury.

Frugality is the central idea. North Carolina-based Blue Force Technologies, a composite aerostructures maker and Boeing supplier, says it can build T-38-size aggressor drones that can replicate the electronic signature, performance and tactics of Chinese or Russian 5th generation J-20 or Su-50 fighters for a flyaway price of about $3 million to $5 million each. The company says the cost per flight-hour (CPFH) of its Fury drone should be about $5,000.

That looks like a pretty good deal next to the cost of flying American F-22s, F-35s, F-15EXs or F-16s against each other. With the caveat that CPFH can be variously calculated and that hard numbers are difficult to come by, consider that the F-22 costs about $58,000 per hour to fly, the F-35 around $36,000, the F-15EX $27,000 and the F-16 $22,000.

To illustrate the costs for Fury, Andrew “Scar” Van Timmeren, a Blue Force vice president who’s a former F-22 pilot, describes a common scenario in which eight F-35s takeoff from Hill AFB, Utah. Four are Blue Air “good guys,” four simulate Red Air “bad guys.” For an hour of air combat training the collective CPFH is approximately $288,000.

For the same CPFH money (or less depending on aircraft numbers) the four Blue Air F-35s could go out and take on 28 or so Fury drones, Van Timmeren says.

Critics point out that the drones still need datalinks and remote operators to function, which bumps up their cost, but the overarching point, Van Timmeren says, is the F-35s would get the kind of training they critically need — intercepts, escorts and fights against numerically superior Red Air forces, a scenario they’d surely face confronting China in the Pacific.

The four Red Air F-35s that didn’t launch can utilize their flight time for other purposes. Because the aggressor exercise goes from fighting against identical F-35s representing a 5th generation threat to a dissimilar aircraft that can represent a variety of 5th generation fighter adversaries, the value of the training increases markedly, Blue Force argues.

The possibility that Blue Force could simulate 5th generation aggressors with cheap unmanned aircraft was enticing enough that the Air Force Research Laboratory awarded the company a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract with a $9 million initial value and options to complete the design and build up to four air vehicles.

In the scheme of things defense, that’s not even peanuts and a lot will depend on follow-up funding to get the drones Blue Force builds to a flight test program. Given the Air Force’s record of not following through on many ideas it gives exploratory funding, it’s impossible to predict whether there is ever a fleet of unmanned Fury aggressor aircraft, government or contractor owned.

Blue Force President Scott Bledsoe says he initially pitched Fury as an ISR drone but a talk with an unnamed fighter pilot pointed them to the aggressor/Red Air niche. The current contract will see the program through a 12-month effort maturing the vehicle design, performing engine ground testing and validating the engine installation with Air Force Research Lab input.

If the lab likes what it sees, it may “exercise a contract option” to complete the design and engineering and produce “up to four air vehicles and complete initial flight testing.” That would theoretically see the droop-nosed UAV flying in 2024. After that, who knows how wide the “Valley of Death” between the initial prototyping effort and an actual acquisition might be?

However, Blue Force might be in a position to stick around longer than other small firms that get initial AFRL or AFWERX funding. Bledsoe asserts that Blue Force is an established company with a self-sustaining business before embarking on Fury/Bandit.

“We came up as a company building things for others — we’re a Boeing-approved supplier. We have a viable business and we can recycle the profits from that into developing this product.”

Blue Force is also having “some conversations” with investors who may be able to provide it with further bridging capital, Bledsoe says. That alone could be enough to get to a “minimum viable product” to use a software reference. Blue Force says that within its tailored design, Fury will consist overwhelmingly of commercial-off-the-shelf parts.

“We’re not trying to make anything new or invent anything new,” Bledsoe explains. “We have a saying, ‘[Fury] is a single engine business jet with no cabin.’ If you boil down the essence of the aircraft and look at what a Cirrus Vision Jet costs, we’re in that neighborhood.”

The 28-foot long, 17-foot wingspan drone will have a light 5,000-pound max takeoff weight. That, along with its aero design and commercially sourced jet engine should give it Mach 0.5 to below Mach 1 cruise/dash speeds and the ability to pull at least one 9G turn before it loses its energy.

Blue Force is “working closely” with two potential engine suppliers, according to Bledsoe. He didn’t say who, but the logical choices would be Williams International and its 2,000 lb-thrust FJ33-5A turbine, which powers the Cirrus Vision, or a 2,000 lb-thrust variant of General Electric’s HF120, which powers the Honda Jet bizjet.

The performance should be enough for what the Fury is intended to do which Alyson Turri, the AFRL Bandit program manager, says is to “be flown in scenarios so that fighter pilots can train against tactically relevant adversaries in threat representative numbers. The goal is to develop an unmanned platform that looks like a fifth-generation adversary with similar vehicle capabilities.”

That doesn’t mean a dogfighting drone. Instead, Fury will “look, act and smell like a Red Air fighter” Van Timmeren affirms. “There’s been a lot of hype around artificial intelligence [pilots] and the DARPA ACE program. That’s not where we are going to live.”

Some 80% to 90% of what Fury will do is present a beyond-visual range simulation of a 5th gen adversary, kicking out representative emissions. Just as manned contract adversary aircraft did in the early days of private Red Air companies, the Fury will make one or two turns before possibly being acquired visually by the good guys and knocking off the encounter.

And with a reconfigurable nose, designed to be quick-changed to accommodate sensor packages replicating different threats, the drone can more flexibly represent different enemies than manned F-16s, F-22s, F-15s or the 3rd/4th generation, Mirage F1s, F-16s, F-5s or Denel Cheetahs flown by private Red Air firms like Textron Airborne Tactical Advantage, Draken International or Tactical Air Support.

Blue Force says it has designed the Fury to be stealthy largely via its shape, small size and lack of a cockpit. To keep cost (and weight) down it does not use any stealth coatings or materials. It has been designed to fit within the Services’ typical Red Air operations infrastructure.

The drone can execute a maximum 4.1 hour sortie. Van Timmeren says it can fly out 150 nautical miles, do two 40-minute training evolutions with a half-hour in between before returning to base. That he asserts, represents a lot of training in the span of one takeoff and one landing. The Fury could be operated from non-towered civilian airfields near military ranges or co-located at military bases.

Fury operators will direct the aircraft remotely from these locations using a combination of autonomy and automation rather than remotely piloting the aircraft as MQ-9 Reaper of RQ-4 Global Hawk operators do. This could allow one Fury operator to control two or more aggressor drones.

“You’ll click on a screen, tell it to fly here or hold here versus having an operator fly it with a [remote] stick and throttle,” Van Timmeren says. “When you remove that stick and throttle [flying], you free up brain [capacity] of an operator to handle more than one aircraft.”

But whatever advanced autonomy, sensors or datalinks might be applied to Fury to make it work and replicate 5th generation threats, they won’t be coming from Blue Force Technologies. The Bandit program is intended to develop the vehicle, not to fit it out.

“We’re building an aircraft that will be able to catch whatever autonomy or datalinks [AFRL] wants from any other programs that arise,” Bledsoe says. “We’re not a mission systems integrator. We don’t want to pick the roles that aircraft would be good for. We think we can sell more if the aircraft is a highly reconfigurable asset.”

Interestingly, Blue Force’s low single digit millions cost per Fury is a flyaway cost Van Timmeren tells me. How the company arrived at this without knowing exactly what combination of radar, infrared, jammer, C2 and other military datalink systems will go into an operational Fury, is a reasonable question. If the UAV could have a variety of modular payloads in the nose, its cost as a complete system/fleet will vary depending on how sophisticated the Air Force or others wish to get.

Blue Force sees other potential roles for its unmanned airframe/engine combo beyond Red Air. Fury, Van Timmeren says, will have a mission computer onboard that has “the hardware and power to support any autonomy [efforts] coming from government or industry”.

That’s not to say that it will compete in the same space as teaming unmanned strike aircraft like Kratos’ XQ-58 Valkyrie or Boeing’s multi-mission MQ-28A Ghost Bat, larger, heavier more strike-oriented machines with external stores, bomb bays and longer range. Fury is more agile, more air-to-air focused Bledsoe says.

“As an adversary air asset, we need to be able to pull a high G turn and feed good air to a business jet engine that’s not used to high distortion flow. We shaped our aircraft to have a good forebody steering of the incoming airflow not unlike an F-16. We come at it from a different place.”

Ultimately, Fury is not a replacement for manned aggressor aircraft that will still train Blue Force pilots at long ranges and close-in. If successfully test flown and acquired, it could help build general trust between human pilots and unmanned aircraft in a range of scenarios.

The best case is that it could effectively represent 5th generation adversaries at a fraction of their cost, saving wear and tear on American fighters while challenging their aircrews with sophisticated systems and in quantities that teach their own lessons.

“If you look down at the glass [radar] as an F-35 pilot,” Van Timmeren says, “you’ll see something that is really training you versus something that pretends to be 5th generation.”