Lockheed Martin is accelerating production of its Vectis collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) and will build four additional prototypes, the company revealed in an exclusive media roundtable, ahead of this week’s AFA Air, Space, Cyber conference. Ron Fehlen, vice president and general manager of Skunk Works, told reporters the company remains on schedule to fly Vectis by the end of 2027 and is now investing in a five-aircraft fleet to speed testing and production maturity.
Fehlen, who goes by the callsign “Epic” and spent 28 years in the Air Force before joining Lockheed Martin, framed Vectis as a convergence point for decades of Skunk Works engineering. He said the aircraft draws on the company’s advanced air vehicle design, artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomy work, and open mission systems heritage, all matured through programs built long before Vectis existed.
Vectis Expands From One Prototype to Five Aircraft
Lockheed Martin will build four more Vectis aircraft in addition to the original prototype, bringing the total fleet to five. Fehlen said the company made the decision internally to lean into the program because the operational environment and acquisition timelines are accelerating.
The additional aircraft will support expanded testing and validate production processes while helping push the capability into the field faster. Fehlen said the four new vehicles will be built and flown even more quickly than the first prototype, though he declined to share updated milestones during the briefing.
Executives also declined to disclose the dollar value of the expanded investment or name specific customers. Fehlen said Lockheed Martin is engaging with a broad set of domestic and international customers across the Air Force and Navy rather than targeting a single buyer, He pointed to interest generated at recent military events as evidence that demand spans multiple services and allied nations.
Design Choices Target Range and Agile Combat Employment
Vectis is a Group 5 CCA measuring roughly 34 feet long with a 38 foot wingspan. Lockheed Martin designed the airframe to be survivable, affordable and flexible across a range of missions that the Air Force and other customers have identified as priorities.
The aircraft features a submerged inlet positioned on top of the fuselage rather than protruding from the airframe. Fehlen said the design reduces frontal drag, which improves range and performance, and lowers the risk of the engine ingesting foreign object debris when operating from austere or damaged runways, to directly support the Air Force’s agile combat employment concept.
Vectis also has no tail, which further reduces drag and helps extend range, according to Fehlen. He said the inlet and tailless configuration have been part of the aircraft’s design since the program began, rather than later additions driven by customer feedback.
Lockheed Martin has not disclosed detailed weight specifications, though the aircraft’s size positions it below the Reaper drone class. The company is targeting a competitive price point for the CCA category and is making design trades to hit that target, Fehlen said, without confirming the widely reported 20 million dollar per unit Air Force benchmark.
Digital Engineering Speeds Prototype Toward 2027 Flight
Fehlen credited the aircraft’s rapid development pace to advanced design and manufacturing processes drawn from other Skunk Works and Advanced Development Programs. Vectis was designed entirely in an integrated digital environment, creating a continuous digital thread that runs from initial design through production and eventual sustainment.
He said the shift replaces the traditional blueprint driven process, in which engineering teams gathered around physical drawings, with a shared digital source of truth that speeds decision making. Fehlen noted that most engineers working the program today have likely never handled a paper blueprint.
The company also uses a technique called minimal tooling determinant assembly, which Fehlen compared to assembling flat pack furniture rather than a build requiring extensive drilling or adhesive work. The approach has cut touch labor hours by roughly 80 percent in some cases and reduced the aircraft’s overall part count, lowering both cost and assembly time.
Fehlen outlined the program’s pace using internal milestones. The team moved from an initial sketch to wind tunnel validation in under two months, completed the first digital build within six months, and released the first physical part after eight months. Major structural components, including the upper surface skin, lower fuselage skin and lower wing skin, are now in production across Lockheed Martin and supplier sites.
Autonomy Software Links Vectis to Navy Programs
Fehlen said Vectis is best understood as a full weapon system rather than an airframe alone, encompassing the hardware, autonomy software and integration with crewed aircraft needed to complete a mission. He pointed to two existing Lockheed Martin programs as building blocks for that architecture.
The first is MDCX, an autonomy command and control (C2) platform the company describes as the current solution of choice for the Navy. MDCX supported the first flight of the MQ-25 refueling drone and is expanding as the Navy’s autonomy control capability across its carrier fleet. Fehlen said Lockheed Martin has already flight tested connecting crewed fighters to CCA through a touchscreen interface, allowing pilots to command uncrewed aircraft directly from the cockpit.
The second building block is the X-62 VISTA, a variable stability aircraft Lockheed Martin has used with the Air Force Test Pilot School to mature AI for aerial intercepts. The program has completed 27 AI enabled intercepts across eight test sorties, generating pilot feedback that Fehlen said is building trust in the autonomy software destined for Vectis.
Fehlen said the autonomy stack complies with the government’s A-MSGRA framework released under Distribution A earlier this year, which allows the system to incorporate different AI models throughout its life cycle. He redirected detailed questions about specific AI vendors and targeting systems, including computer vision at the merge phase of an engagement, to the government customers developing those elements.
Propulsion and Stealth Details Stay Under Wraps
Asked whether Vectis follows the low cost attritable design path some competitors have pursued, Fehlen said Lockheed Martin is instead optimizing propulsion and other systems around a competitive CCA price point while maximizing capability, rather than accepting the lower performance often associated with fully attritable platforms.
On stealth, Fehlen declined to compare Vectis directly to the F-22 or F-35 but confirmed survivability is a core design goal. He also declined to confirm whether specific technology from Lockheed Martin’s Next Generation Air Dominance proposal carried over into Vectis, saying the company instead applies proven manufacturing and digital engineering tools across programs rather than tying design elements to a single prior effort.
Fehlen said the aircraft is being designed for multirole missions, including air-to-air and air-to-ground tasking, though the company has not disclosed a timeline for weapons testing beyond confirming first flight remains set for the end of 2027.
Lockheed Martin plans to display a full-scale Vectis model this week at its booth during AFA Air, Space, Cyber, where Fehlen and other Skunk Works subject matter experts will be available to discuss the program in more detail.
This is a repurposing/rewriting task based on the article I already drafted from the transcript, so no new tool lookups are needed.