Air Force selects three companies for Skyborg experiments in July

The Air Force has chosen Boeing, General Atomics and Kratos to produce unmanned aerial vehicle prototypes to team with manned aircraft during initial Skyborg flight experiments slated to start in July, the service announced in a press release today.

The Skyborg program is building a core software system that integrates with attritable UAVs, enabling them to perform autonomous mission sets as wingmen supporting human pilots. The effort is one of the Air Force's inaugural, vanguard initiatives designed to rapidly deliver game-changing technology to the field.

Since July, the Air Force has awarded 13 companies indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts to compete for task orders supporting Skyborg prototyping, experimentation and autonomy development under a $400 million shared ceiling over six years. Boeing, General Atomics and Kratos were among the first vendors the Air Force signed deals with.

The three companies each received a 24-month contract for the initial experimentation task order, according to today's release. The Air Force awarded $26 million to Boeing, $14 million to General Atomics and $38 million to Kratos. It's unclear why the values differ, but the service expects to receive the UAVs by May 2021 to conduct initial flight testing before beginning experiments in July.

"This award is a major step forward for our game-changing Skyborg capability -- this award supporting our operational experimentation is truly where concepts become realities," Brig. Gen. Dale White, the Air Force's program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft, said in the notice. "We will experiment to prove out this technology and to do that we will aggressively test and fly to get this capability into the hands of our warfighters."