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 Scaled Composites 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 1. The firm’s Increment 1 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 2, 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 1 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.

Contact the author: Tyler@twz.com