Airbus and Kratos have flown the U740 Valkyrie, an uncrewed combat jet, in Europe for the first time, Airbus said on 12 October. It took off with a rocket booster from an unnamed test site in Northern Europe and reached Mach 0.8.
The airframe is Kratos’s Valkyrie, which Airbus describes as proven and already a program of record. What Airbus adds is the brain. Its MARS mission system, the software, mission applications, data and hardware that fly the missions, is meant to give Germany or another European user sovereign control over how the aircraft is used.
MARS uses AI to fly missions on its own and coordinate several aircraft. A person stays “on the loop”, supervising rather than piloting. The next tests put MARS through harder flying.
The Valkyrie weighs about three tonnes at take-off and is 9.1 metres long, with a range of more than 5,000 km and a ceiling of 45,000 feet, the release says. It has an internal weapons bay and stations under the wings. It can fly alone or alongside crewed fighters such as the Eurofighter, launching from a rail or a runway.
Airbus names the German armed forces and other European forces as its customers, but no order has been announced. The two companies say they are on track for a combat-ready collaborative combat aircraft by 2029. “Air forces require affordable combat mass,” said Mike Schoellhorn, chief executive of Airbus Defence and Space.
The release gives no flight duration, no altitude and no name for the test site.
