Lockheed Martin Vectis Targets First Flight by End of 2027

Lockheed Martin is building four more prototypes of its tailless stealth drone with company money, and has yet to name a customer.

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Lockheed Martin has expanded its self-funded Vectis drone program from one prototype to five aircraft, the company said Monday, with first flight still targeted for the end of 2027.

The company’s Skunk Works division announced the expansion at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference, where it also showed a full-scale model of the tailless stealth drone for the first time.

All of it is corporate money. The Air Force has not put Vectis under contract, and the company is spending ahead of any requirement. Ron Fehlen, Skunk Works vice president and general manager, has declined to tie Vectis to a single competition, saying Lockheed Martin sees buyers for the aircraft beyond the Air Force, including the Navy and foreign militaries.

A Bet Placed Before the Requirement

Lockheed Martin has reason to move early. In April 2024, the Air Force picked Anduril Industries and General Atomics, whose aircraft were later designated the YFQ-44A Fury and the YFQ-42A Dark Merlin for the program’s first increment. The Air Force has said it hopes the drones will come in at roughly $20 million each once production is at full rate. Lockheed Martin was passed over.

According to John Clark, Fehlen’s predecessor at Skunk Works, the company’s Increment 1 offering carried more stealth and survivability than the Air Force’s baseline requirements demanded. Lockheed Martin’s operational analysis argued that a tougher aircraft would return more value over time in high-threat airspace — an argument that lost out as the service prioritized cost and numbers for the first tranche. Air Force officials have since pushed back on the “attritable” label: Col. Timothy Helfrich, the portfolio acquisition executive for fighters and advanced aircraft, said in July that the service views collaborative combat aircraft as “optionally attritable,” and Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said in June he did not consider any of them truly attritable.

The Air Force intends to buy at least 1,000 Collaborative Combat Aircraft to fly alongside its crewed fighters, complicating an enemy’s targeting problem and pushing sensors farther forward. Increment 1 is now in production. The YFQ-42A first flew in August 2025 and the YFQ-44A followed that October, and in June the Air Force selected both for production.

Concept refinement for Increment 2 is scheduled to run through mid-2027 among nine vendors, and the Air Force has said it expects to carry as many as six designs into prototyping. Fehlen declined to name a customer, saying Vectis is not aimed at any single competition and that Lockheed Martin sees buyers beyond the Air Force, including the Navy and foreign militaries. Unit cost for that round has not been set.

Fehlen has rejected the attritable label for Vectis, describing the category as a significant step down in both cost and capability and saying Skunk Works is instead trying to maximize performance, payload and endurance. The company says it is chasing a competitive price point anyway, by rebuilding how the aircraft is manufactured.

Built Around Its Air Intake

Vectis falls in the Pentagon’s Group 5 category — drones heavier than 1,320 pounds that operate above 18,000 feet — and measures roughly 34 feet long with a 38-foot wingspan — about the length of an MQ-9A Reaper, but with a sharply swept span closer to an F-35’s. It has no vertical or horizontal tails. Yaw and pitch control come from the wing trailing edges, which carry stealth serrations of the kind seen on the B-2 Spirit, and from fly-by-wire software.

The most scrutinized feature sits on top. Vectis draws air through a deeply recessed dorsal inlet behind a downward-sloping, V-shaped channel, loosely echoing the intakes on the B-21 Raider and the MQ-25 Stingray. Fehlen said the inlet has been part of the design from the beginning and described it as “a design that has a long heritage for us.” He cited two benefits: it trims frontal drag, which helps range, and it keeps the intake away from runway debris, which matters under the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment doctrine of dispersing aircraft to austere or hastily repaired airfields. He confirmed the shaping also serves survivability but declined to elaborate. Submerged inlets of this kind also shield the engine face from radars looking up from below.

The penalty is aerodynamic. Flush inlets swallow the slow, turbulent boundary layer that builds along the forward fuselage, and combined with S-duct pressure gradients, that can distort airflow at the compressor face badly enough to stall an engine in flight. Managing it without drag-inducing auxiliary doors is a computational fluid dynamics problem. Lockheed Martin has said only that the inlet has been part of the design from the start and that Vectis was designed in a fully integrated digital environment.

A Business-Jet Engine, Chosen to Save Time

The first prototype will fly with a Williams International FJ44-4, a commercial-off-the-shelf turbofan producing more than 3,600 pounds of thrust. Fehlen said the company is looking at a higher-thrust replacement for later aircraft. The FJ44-4 draws from a compact, twin-spool core. Two engines from the same family, the FJ44-4A, power the Cessna Citation CJ4, a business jet that cruises at up to 451 knots and operates as high as 45,000 feet.

“By leveraging a mature, rugged turbofan, we can accelerate our timeline and demonstrate a game-changing capability quickly,” said Peter McArdle, Integrated Systems program director at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. A known engine also narrows the troubleshooting: if something goes wrong in flight test, engineers can look at the airframe or the software instead of the powerplant.

The alternative was waiting. The Air Force is funding two sets of clean-sheet engines for unmanned aircraft. Beehive Industries, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney and a GE Aerospace-Kratos team are working on a 1,400- to 1,600-pound thrust class, with preliminary design running through May 2027. GE Aerospace and Rolls-Royce are developing a medium class of 5,000 to 6,000 pounds.

Single-engine and subsonic, Vectis is built for the distances of the Indo-Pacific, European and U.S. Central Command theaters, the company says. The engine’s dual-channel Full Authority Digital Engine Control ties directly into the flight control computers, letting the autonomy modulate thrust without mechanical linkages.

Assembly Borrowed From Flat-Pack Furniture

The schedule has been unusually compressed. Fehlen said the program went from a preliminary design sketched on a napkin to wind-tunnel validation in under two months, completed its first full digital build in six months and released its first production part to the factory floor in eight.

The manufacturing method is the bigger claim. Skunk Works is using minimal tooling determinate assembly, in which parts are machined with interlocking tabs, pre-drilled holes and precise mating surfaces so they self-locate — no massive steel jigs required. Fehlen likened it to assembling ready-to-assemble furniture, and said Skunk Works has seen the approach cut labor hours by 80% in many cases.

Lockheed Martin has also partnered with Auburn University’s National Center for Additive Manufacturing Excellence to consolidate multi-part assemblies into single 3D-printed components. Those flight-intended parts are to be evaluated on the prototypes flying in 2027.

Autonomy With a Flight-Test Record

Lockheed Martin is pointing to its Multi Domain Combat System, or MDCX, the open-architecture command-and-control software inside the Navy’s MD-5 Ground Control Station, which controlled the first flights of the MQ-25A Stingray beginning in April 2026 at MidAmerica Airport in Illinois. The Air Force has been fitting a government-owned framework called the Autonomy Government Reference Architecture, or A-GRA, to the Increment 1 drones, a standard meant to prevent vendor lock-in. Fehlen said autonomy and command-and-control requirements for Vectis would be set by individual customers and could involve third-party vendors.

Skunk Works has developed its artificial intelligence flight algorithms on the X-62A Variable Stability In-Flight Simulator Test Aircraft, known as VISTA, a heavily modified F-16D. In one campaign, the aircraft completed 27 AI-controlled intercepts of a live T-38 Talon across eight sorties, and that telemetry is being folded into the Vectis autonomy stack.

The drone can fly on its own, under supervision from a ground station, or tethered to an F-35 or F-22, whose pilots would assign tasks through a simplified tablet interface rather than a stick and throttle.

The Export Pitch

A Lockheed Martin promotional video released with the announcement shows an internal bay carrying at least two munitions, and depicts the drone launching an AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile and a pair of GBU-53/B StormBreaker glide bombs. A faceted enclosure under the nose houses an electro-optical/infrared turret.

Wargaming published in 2024 by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, an affiliate of the Air & Space Forces Association, found that players wanted a mix of drone types: cheap, expendable aircraft in the opening days of a campaign, then a growing share of moderately priced aircraft that could survive, return and fly again. The study’s headline finding, however, was that affordability mattered most, and players gravitated toward lower-cost designs across the board.

Lockheed Martin is also selling abroad, pitching Vectis to F-35 operators overseas. Fehlen said the company showed the aircraft at the Farnborough International Airshow in England in July and has held talks in Dubai and with potential partner companies in South Korea and Germany. It displayed a scale model at the Brussels European Defence Exhibition in March, where the Belgian Air Force was a principal target. The name comes from the Latin word for lever.