Mojave: Northrop's YFQ-48A Handles Every Phase of Its Maiden Sortie Without a Pilot

Northrop's YFQ-48A, which the company calls Talon Blue, has flown for the first time, and the aircraft controlled itself from start to finish. The flight took place at Mojave, in California's high desert. The airframe moved itself along the ground, got airborne, ran through a set of maneuvers and brought itself back down to the runway with no human hands on the controls. Owners know from their own logbooks how much of a pilot's attention goes to the ground segments and to each end of a flight, so it matters that the whole sequence was autonomous, not just the time at altitude. Talon Blue is a defense airframe, not something bound for a Part 91 hangar, and nothing in the report suggests otherwise. Still, an American manufacturer flew a clean first sortie over American desert, and that deserves a note on its own terms.

With reporting from AVweb.