Jet fighter lags behind

Anduril’s most high-profile, and potentially most lucrative, military project has also faced challenges.

When Anduril won a multimillion-dollar Air Force contract last year to develop and test a prototype of an unmanned jet fighter, known as a “Collaborative Combat Aircraft,” it signaled the company’s biggest shot yet at building a major weapon system for the Pentagon. The company, which has never manufactured weapons at a large scale, is building a plant in Ohio to produce the unmanned jet.

Air Force leaders initially set expectations for the aircraft to fly before the end of summer. But in a test in August, a mechanical issue caused a nail to be sucked into the aircraft’s intake, damaging the engine, people familiar with the matter said.

Anduril didn’t publicly disclose the engine issue, and when asked about the timing of the flight during a call with reporters in September, Luckey said the delay was due to the rigors of Air Force ground testing because the Air Force had only one Anduril plane to work with at the time.

“If it was up to my engineers, we’d push the throttle

and shoot into the air months ago,” Luckey said during the call.

Executives also told reporters that the company was taking time to get the software right, which they said would allow them to “leapfrog” the test plan by flying semiautonomously.

By the time the drone jet Fury took to the skies over Southern California on Oct. 31, the test flight came two months after the first flight of Anduril’s main competitor in the Air Force program, General Atomics.

Anduril said the nail that caused the engine damage was the result of a temporarily installed test instrument and had nothing to do with the structural design of the aircraft. The Air Force said Anduril and General Atomics were ahead of the program’s schedule, which required a test flight of their aircraft by the end of the year.

“Both Anduril and General Atomics are in the very early developmental stages of what promises great opportunity, but there’s a long way to go to realize that opportunity,” said David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who is now dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, an aerospace think tank.