Anduril Industries rolled the first Ohio-built FQ-44A Fury off the assembly line at its Arsenal-1 plant in Pickaway County on Monday, 27 July 2026, the first complete aircraft to emerge from a facility that only began production in March.
The company built its messaging around the pace of the build-out, stating that “557 days ago, Arsenal-1 didn’t exist” before the first Ohio-built Fury came off the line.
The aircraft carried the YFQ-44A designation until 17 June 2026, when the United States Air Force ordered it and General Atomics’ competing design into production, dropping the prototype “Y” prefix from each.
That dual award closed out expectations of a competitive down-select, and future Increment 1 lots of the collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) will be bought exclusively from the two firms.
Arsenal-1 represents a $910.5 million commitment from Anduril across five million square feet on a 500-acre campus adjacent to Rickenbacker International Airport, projected to employ 4,008 people by 2035 and rated in its current configuration to produce up to 150 aircraft a year.
The campus is still going up around the line, with reporting from the event noting that the main hangar remained incomplete and a second building was still a shell.
Matt Grimm, Anduril co-founder and chief operating officer, said at the rollout that “today we intend to write the next chapter of flight, unmanned flight and autonomous air power, right here in Ohio.”
The Fury first flew on 31 October 2025 from Southern California Logistics Airport at Victorville, accompanied by two L-29 Delfin chase aircraft, roughly two months after General Atomics flew its own airframe.
Weapons work followed on 15 July 2026, when the aircraft released an AIM-120 against a digital target over the Mojave Desert in a test conducted by the 412th Test Wing’s Air Dominance Combined Test Force.
The service stated alongside that test that release authority rests exclusively with a human operator, who retains command and control of the platform throughout.
The employment and tactics work runs on a separate track. On 28 July the Air Force Warfare Center reported a multi-day Agile Combat Employment exercise at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, run by the CCA Experimental Operations Unit alongside the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center.
The airframe flown there was identified as the Anduril design, flying multiple sorties to demonstrate reliability, extended range, integration with crewed aircraft and dispersed operations.
Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen, who commands the Experimental Operations Unit, framed the intent as operating CCA outside a traditional test environment so that the unit can keep learning from realistic conditions.
On quantity, Col. Timothy Helfrich, the Air Force’s portfolio acquisition executive for fighters and advanced aircraft, has said the service must deliver 150-plus by 2030, which sets a floor for how many aircraft must come across the production lots.
Helfrich has separately said the program is tracking below its $30 million per-unit target, against a fiscal year 2027 request of $996.5 million in procurement and roughly $1.37 billion in research and development.
Attention is now turning to Increment 2, where more than 20 industry partners are eligible to compete for the next design phase.
The service expects to narrow that field after about ten more months of concept refinement, with Helfrich putting the target at roughly six vendors for prototyping while committing to maximize competition through every phase of the increment.
