Fury YFQ-44 touched down at Creech with a Learjet chase
Aircraft trackers and public social posts recorded Anduril’s YFQ-44 Fury (serial 25-1003) departing Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville and flying west alongside a Learjet chase aircraft, reported user Parker A., who posted that “Anduril Fury YFQ-44A (25-1003) looks to be headed to Creech! Its chase Learjet 35 (N721EC) is nearby, too.” The Fury recovered at Creech Air Force Base in southern Nevada, the service’s central hub for uncrewed aircraft operations and home to the MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-170 Sentinel.
What the CCA EOU is testing at Creech
The USAF statement makes clear the trial is an Agile Combat Employment (ACE) exercise run by the CCA Experimental Operations Unit. The stated goals are to “build tactical concepts, test lean sustainment, and refine Air Force-led human-machine teaming.” Testing is taking place across a combination of government-owned and contractor-owned facilities “that allow us to evaluate CCA performance in realistic operational scenarios,” the spokesperson said, while adding that further details are being withheld for operational security.
How this exercise links to recent CCA milestones
The Creech deployment follows a string of recent tests and decisions. The USAF’s Increment One down-select selected both Anduril’s YFQ-44 Fury and General Atomics’ YFQ-42 Dark Merlin for production. The Fury that arrived at Creech, serial 25-1003, is the same airframe that Anduril publicly showed executing “first missile shot from YFQ-44A” on July 15, 2026, in what Anduril described as “an end-to-end, beyond-line-of-sight strike against a simulated target” out of Edwards AFB.
The CCA EOU has already exercised ACE concepts in the Pacific with Boeing’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat as part of Exercise Valiant Shield, and it ran a similar exercise at Edwards AFB in April. At Edwards in April only the YFQ-44 could attend because the Dark Merlin had been in a stand-down following an accident; Dark Merlin has since returned to flight and both designs have been approved to move into production. These sequences — Edwards, the Pacific, and now Creech — provide multiple baselines for comparison across different CCAs and operational settings.
Logistics, maintenance, integration and trust: core challenges under examination
The reporting highlights that many of the program’s largest uncertainties are not whether CCAs can fire weapons but how they will be employed: logistics and maintenance, integration with manned fighters, and “building trust” between human operators and autonomous or remotely operated systems. The EOU, the USAF says, exists precisely to reduce risks in these areas and to define the “pages” that will be needed in a USAF CCA playbook.
What this means for the Royal Netherlands Air Force, USAF operators, and Anduril/General Atomics
- Royal Netherlands Air Force: As observers at Creech, their presence will let them compare ACE operations and human-machine teaming approaches firsthand, informing any multinational interoperability considerations the USAF and its partners may pursue.
- USAF operators and the CCA EOU: The unit will use the July 20–24 trials to refine end-to-end ground and flight operations, stress lean sustainment practices in austere or moving locations, and test concepts that were baked into CCA requirements from the start.
- Anduril and General Atomics: With both the YFQ-44 and YFQ-42 in production, data and outcomes from Creech will feed into operationalization decisions for sustainment, basing, and human-machine teaming doctrine — areas the EOU is explicitly focused on clarifying.
There is visible pressure on the CCA program: reporting notes the technology is expected to help the USAF’s force generate combat mass and provide tactical edges against a near-peer opponent identified in the coverage as China. The Creech exercise, running July 20–24, 2026, will add one more set of operational data points to evaluate how CCAs perform under ACE conditions and how rapidly the service can move from demonstrations to routine, operational employment. The results will help define the tactical concepts and sustainment practices that may populate the USAF’s future CCA playbook.
Source: TWZ — Fury Loyal Wingman Arrives At Creech AFB For Agile Combat Deployment Trials
