Lockheed Martin says the stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter now has a firmly demonstrated ability to act as an in-flight ‘quarterback’ for advanced drones like the U.S. Air Force’s future Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) with the help of artificial intelligence-enabled systems. The company states that its testing has also shown a touchscreen tablet-like device is a workable interface for controlling multiple uncrewed aircraft simultaneously from the cockpit of the F-35, as well as the F-22 Raptor. For the U.S. Air Force, how pilots in crewed aircraft will actually manage CCAs during operations has emerged as an increasingly important question.
Details about F-35 and F-22 related crewed-uncrewed teaming developments were included in a press release that Lockheed Martin put out late yesterday, wrapping up various achievements for the company in 2024.
Lockheed Martin
The F-35 “has the capability to control drones, including the U.S. Air Force’s future fleet of Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Recently, Lockheed Martin and industry partners demonstrated end-to-end connectivity including the seamless integration of AI technologies to control a drone in flight utilizing the same hardware and software architectures built for future F-35 flight testing,” the press release states. “These AI-enabled architectures allow Lockheed Martin to not only prove out piloted-drone teaming capabilities, but also incrementally improve them, bringing the U.S. Air Force’s family of systems vision to life.”
“Lockheed Martin has demonstrated its piloted-drone teaming interface, which can control multiple drones from the cockpit of an F-35 or F-22,” the release adds. “This technology allows a pilot to direct multiple drones to engage enemies using a touchscreen tablet in the cockpit of their 5th Gen aircraft.”
A US Air Force image depicting an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter flying together with a Boeing MQ-28 Ghost Bat drone. USAF A US Air Force image depicting an MQ-28 Ghost Bat flying together with an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. USAF
The press release also highlights prior crewed-uncrewed teaming work that Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works advanced projects division has done with the University of Iowa’s Operator Performance Laboratory (OPL) using surrogate platforms. OPL has also been working with other companies, including Shield AI, as well as the U.S. military, to support advanced autonomy and drone development efforts in recent years.
In November 2024, Lockheed Martin notably announced it had conducted tests with OPL that saw a human controller in an L-39 Albatros jet use a touchscreen interface to order two L-29 Delfin jets, equipped with AI-enabled flight technology acting as surrogate drones, to engage simulated enemy fighters. This sounds very similar to the kind of control architecture the company says it has now demonstrated on the F-35.
A view of the “battle manager” at work in the back seat of the L-39 jet during issuing commands to the L-29s acting as surrogate drones. Lockheed Martin
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The Air Force is also still very much in the process of developing new concepts of operations and tactics, techniques, and procedures for employing CCA drones operationally. How the drones will fit into the service’s force structure and be utilized in routine training and other day-to-day peacetime activities, along with what the maintenance and logistical demands will be, also remains to be seen. Questions about in-flight command and control have emerged as particularly important ones to answer in the near term.
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As Lockheed Martin’s new touting of its work on tablet-based control interfaces highlights, there is a significant debate now just about how pilots will physically issue orders and otherwise manage drones from their cockpits.
A picture of a drone control system using a tablet-like device that General Atomics has previously released. GA-ASI
“There’s a lot of opinions amongst the Air Force about the right way to go [about controlling drones from other aircraft],” John Clark, then head of Skunk Works, also told The War Zone and others at the AFA gathering in September 2024. “The universal thought, though, is that this [a tablet or other touch-based interface] may be the fastest way to begin experimentation. It may not be the end state.”
“We’re working through a spectrum of options that are the minimum invasive opportunities, as well as something that’s more organically equipped, where there’s not even a tablet,” Clark added.
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In addition, there are still many questions about the secure communications architectures that will be needed to support operations involving CCAs and similar drones, as well as for F-35s and F-22s to operate effectively in the airborne controller role. The F-35 could use the popular omnidirectional Link 16 network for this purpose, but doing so would make it easier for opponents to detect the fighter jet and the drone. The F-22, which has long only had the ability to transmit and not receive data via Link 16, faces similar issues.
It’s also worth noting here that the U.S. military has been publicly demonstrating the ability of tactical jets to actively control drones in mid-air for nearly a decade now, at least. In 2015, a U.S. Marine Corps AV-8B Harrier jump jet flew notably together with a Kratos Unmanned Tactical Aerial Platform-22 (UTAP-22) drone in testing that included “command and control through the tactical data link.” Other experimentation is known to have occurred across the U.S. military since then, and this doesn’t account for additional work in the classified domain.
