General Atomics Reveals New Carrier-Capable UCAV concept
August 8, 2024
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc (GA-ASI) has unveiled a fifth variant of its Gambit collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) concept.
GA-ASI revealed its Gambit unmanned aircraft project in March 2022, unveiling a family of four notional variants that were to be based on a common ‘Gambit Core’ fuselage ‘chassis’. This ‘chassis’ incorporated the landing gear, flight control system and some avionics. The different variants used different airframes, wings, powerplants, and sensors and/or weapons to meet different operational requirements – tailoring signature characteristics, endurance, payload and performance for specific mission sets, while retaining about 70% commonality by using the universal core chassis.
This so-called ‘genus/species’ concept was developed by GA-ASI with the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) as part of the Low-Cost Attritable Aircraft Platform Sharing programme. It has subsequently been implemented in the XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station and the company’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) offering.
Gambit 1 was optimised as an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platform Gambit 2 as an air-to-air weapons carrier, Gambit 3 a high-fideilty adversary training aircraft, and Gambit 3 was a low-observable, long endurance, penetrating ISR aircraft.
The new Gambit 5 is based on the airframe of the Gambit 2, but would not necessarily have to be weaponised, and could serve as a carrier-capable ISR version. It features a strengthened, marinised airframe and landing gear stressed for the higher loads associated with catapault/EMALS-assisted launch and arrested recovery on board an aircraft carrier.
Mark Brinkley, GA-ASI’s senior director for strategic communications and marketing said that: “We see a number of nations who are interested in extending the Collaborative Combat Aircraft or Autonomous Collaborative Platform concept into their ships. So we know that this carrier-launched version is something that is generating interest.” Interestingly, at Farnborough, GA-ASI executives frequently used the UK ACP acronym (for Autonomous Collaborative Platform) rather than the CCA (Collaborative Combat Aircraft) preferred in the US.
Brinkley said that the company had explored the possibility of operating Gambit 5 in concert with the MQ-9B STOL (short takeoff/landing variant), which he said would “really effect a transformation.” He noted an interest in the concept from: “the US, the UK, Australia and Japan on how they might work on this concept together. We’re beginning to explore what international carrier-capable co-operation might look like.”
There are currently no plans to build a Gambit 5 prototype, and Brinkley described the project as “more than theory, less than prototype.”
