U.S. Army’s Vision For Loyal Wingman Drones To Fly With Its Helicopters Is Taking Shape
The Army is following the other services' Collaborative Combat Aircraft efforts as it looks to team its rotorcraft with highly autonomous drones.
Joseph Trevithick, Howard Altman
Published Oct 17, 2025 1:01 PM EDT
The U.S. Army is in the very early stages of formulating a vision for fleets of advanced and highly autonomous drones in a similar vein to the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) that the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps, and U.S. Navy are now developing.
The Bell V-247 design seen in this rendering is just one could align with the Army's emerging CCA plans.
Bell
The U.S. Army is in the very early stages of formulating a vision for fleets of advanced and highly autonomous drones in a similar vein to the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) that the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps, and U.S. Navy are now developing. The Army’s CCA endeavor may ultimately be linked, at least in some way, with work already being done on so-called “launched effects,” a term generally applied to smaller uncrewed aerial systems designed to be fired from other platforms in the air, as well as on the ground and at sea.
Army aviation officials talked about the current state of the service’s CCA plans during a roundtable on the sidelines of the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual conference this week, at which TWZ was in attendance. The topic had also come up elsewhere during the three-day event, which ended yesterday. Army CCAs would be primarily expected to operate in close cooperation with the service’s existing crewed helicopters, as well as its future MV-75A tiltrotors.
The Army’s design of the Army’s future MV-75 tiltrotor is based on Bell’s V-280 Valor, seen here. Bell
“So, one, we’re following the other services very closely as they’re looking at this, this [CCA] concept,” Brig. Gen. Phillip C. Baker, the Army’s Aviation Future Capabilities Director, said at the roundtable. “I think for the Army, especially launched effects, it comes down to a discussion of mass. … A platform, a loyal wingman, a CCA concept, allows you to increase mass while also reducing the amount of aviators you’ve got to have in the air.”
Baker noted that the Army is working in particular with U.S. military commands in the Pacific and European regions as it begins to explore potential CCA requirements, which might lead to an operational capability in the next few years. For the past year or so, the Army has been working to figure out “the capabilities that they need in order to deliver that mass, and really survivability,” he added.
https://www.twz.com/air/u-s-armys-vision-for-loyal-wingman-drones-to-fly-with-its-helicopters-is-taking-shape
