Northrop Grumman has secretly built a large new uncrewed aircraft system (UAS), dubbed Project Lotus, at the company’s Scaled Composites rapid prototyping facility in Mojave, California, a source familiar with the project tells Aviation Week.
A photo of the aircraft reviewed by Aviation Week revealed a completed, turbofan-powered aircraft parked within the Scaled Composites compound at the public airport.
The Lotus UAS design in some ways resembles features of the newly revealed Lockheed Martin Project Vectis, with a long, slender fuselage positioned forward of the leading edges of the wings, capped by a nose with swept-back edges leading to a slender point.
In many other respects, the Lotus and Vectis designs diverge. Unlike the engine inlet mounted low at mid-fuselage for the Vectis aircraft, the Lotus inlet sits high atop of the extreme aft section of its fuselage. The Lotus also sports sharply canted tails, breaking from the tailless-configured Vectis.
Project Lotus appears to represent Northrop’s candidate for the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) Increment 2 program, which is finalizing requirements for competitive prototypes ahead of a scheduled acquisition process next year. The photo reveals that Northrop has already built a demonstrator, perhaps gaining a step on Lockheed’s rival design, which is not scheduled to reach first flight until 2027.
As Northrop’s rapid prototyping arm, the Scaled Composites facility frequently builds aircraft demonstrators in secret. Scaled Composites registered a turbofan-powered, fixed-wing aircraft identified only as Model 444 earlier this year with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which granted the organization the N444LX tail number. It is not clear if the registration represents Project Lotus or another undisclosed project.
Northrop also is building the XRQ-73, also known as the Series Hybrid Electric Propulsion AiR Demonstration (Shepard), for DARPA.
In response to questions about Project Lotus from Aviation Week, Northrop avoided direct answers, but spoke generally about its internal investments in autonomous aircraft.
“Our investments prioritize production at speed and scale, without sacrificing performance or capability. The Northrop Grumman team has generated step-change advancements in production speed, weight and parts reduction, and overall cost efficiency. These advancements benefit the spectrum of autonomous capabilities we produce at Northrop Grumman for U.S. and international customers,” Northrop said.
As Lockheed’s Project Vectis design revealed in September, Northrop’s Project Lotus represents one side in a long-running debate within industry and the Air Force over the future direction of the CCA fleet between concepts that emphasize greater survivability or lower cost.
In 2024, the Air Force decided to seek a middle ground between cost and survivability with the selected competitive prototypes for the CCA Increment 1 program. The General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. YFQ-42 and Anduril YFQ-44 are large aircraft that feature some low-observable, or stealth, technology. But the aircraft are larger and costlier than, for example, the Kratos XQ-58, and lack the stealthier features of Project Vectis and Project Lotus.
In September, Air Force officials said they were considering the full spectrum of options for the Increment 2 CCA requirement, ranging from exquisite survivability to small, air-launched systems.
Project Lotus also lends new insight into how Northrop’s internal CCA concepts have evolved from previous, publicly released ideas. As the Air Force competition for CCAs heated up in 2023, Northrop showed off the SG-1 and SG-2 concepts, which appeared similar to the cranked-kite planform of the U.S. Navy-funded X-47B demonstrator. Around the same time, Northrop also unveiled the Model 437 concept, an autonomous spinoff from the crewed Model 401 Sierra demonstrator. The Model 437 finally emerged as a piloted demonstrator aircraft in 2024.
Earlier this year, Northrop announced that the aircraft had transitioned into the Beacon demonstrator, serving as a testbed for mission autonomy technology.
