Startup Aims To Deliver An Autonomous Airlifter For USAF By 2028

Teams of U.S. Air Force and industry planners, operators and technologists gathered in a conference room in 2024 to imagine an air war over Taiwan, but this wargame came with a twist.

The advent of collaborative combat aircraft (CCA)—a family of largely autonomous, jet-powered combat aircraft capable of a wide range of military missions—changed their approach. By basing these CCAs on small airstrips in southern Japan and the northern Philippines, the air war planners found a disruptive new weapon to threaten Chinese air superiority over the Taiwan Strait.

However, a summary produced by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, which hosted the wargame, found one problem with that plan: The Air Force lacks an airlift fleet that could resupply the forward bases, which would lie well within the engagement zone of Chinese missiles. Even if enough Lockheed Martin C-130s and Boeing C-17s could be spared for the task, sending them so deep into hostile territory would incur severe risks.

The Air Force should “assess the potential for uninhabited aircraft to provide CCA logistics,” says the report, authored by Col. Mark A. Gunzinger, Mitchell’s director of Future Aerospace Concepts. In other words, someone may soon need to build a large autonomous airlifter with a range and payload relevant to the vast Indo-Pacific theater of operations.

Meet the Tacit Spear, a concept from the Atropos Group, a two-month-old startup based in Arlington, Virginia.

It is an autonomous aircraft designed by Darold Cummings—a former Northrop Grumman aircraft configuration lead and a current Aviation Week contributor—to deliver a Leonardo C-27J Spartan-like payload of about 20,000 lb. with a cargo bay large enough to carry three military-standard 463L pallets. Air-dropped munitions, including mines, are also a payload option. It would come with a ferry range of 2,500 nm, which is long enough to self-deploy to staging bases in the Pacific. And its twin-turbofan, embedded engines and swept wings can take off and land from unimproved airfields as short as 5,000 ft.

With sharps chines down the upper fuselage, forward-swept inlets and canted tails, the Tacit Spear is designed to operate in hostile airspace. The concept would add a new capability in air mobility, not a direct replacement for existing aircraft derived from commercial models.

As the timeline for the unveiling suggests, Atropos’ founders are focused on speed. The Tacit Spear is scheduled for a first flight in less than three years. Atropos also plans to develop more products, including commercial variants of the uncrewed airlifter.

“Our first product is a clean-sheet development, test and operation of the aircraft version of the Liberty Ship for the Information Age—unmanned, autonomous, versatile, mass-producible and capable of delivering relevant mass over relevant ranges,” Atropos CEO and co-founder Colin Carroll says.

Atropos is considering a wide range of applications beyond airlift. In addition to delivering or air-dropping cargo, the payload bay can be used to launch munitions or host sensors and data links. But the initial focus is to address the Air Force’s potential need for an airlifter that can reach far-flung bases in the Pacific theater.

“Our focal point mission is a logistics mission for the first design reference mission we are building toward,” Carroll says.

Development of a large, uncrewed cargo aircraft is a new concept in the U.S. defense industry, but not abroad. In the past 12 months, China has revealed two uncrewed logistics aircraft—it unveiled the Air White Whale W5000 in November and flew the larger Aerospace CH UAV Co. Ltd. CH-YH1000 for the first time in May.

Lacking a confirmed requirement from the Defense Department for a similar aircraft, the U.S. defense industry has been slow to respond. But the Pentagon has been looking for options. Transportation Command has been considering launches of intercontinental rockets to deliver cargo to forward bases. DARPA started developing the C-17-size Liberty Lifter, but abandoned the wing-in-ground-effect aircraft project this year.

To reach such an audacious goal in 2028, Atropos expects to take a different approach to financing and developing a large, autonomous aircraft.

The startup plans to raise about 80% of the financing privately for development. So far, the company has secured $6 million in pre-seed funding. In an era of intense interest in financing new defense technology, the company’s founders—Carroll and Vince Dutcavich—expect to be well-funded by a team of top-tier investors.

For the final one-fifth of the multibillion-dollar development bill of the Tacit Spear, the Atropos founders are targeting the Defense Department’s research, development and test and evaluation budget.

A precedent exists with the $215 million awarded by the Air Force to JetZero. That contract helps fund the development of a full-scale prototype of the Z4, which is a vision for a blended wing body airliner that could be adapted into a military refueler and airlifter.

The Atropos business plan proposes a different approach. The company plans to certify the airworthiness of the autonomous aircraft on a dual-use basis, then offer the aircraft to the Pentagon as a service. The strategy shifts the financial burden out of the procurement budget and into the operations and maintenance accounts.

Such a strategy also proposes an alternative path to a frequent dead end for largely self-funded new aircraft. Since the 1980s, Northrop’s self-funded F-20 fighter and Textron AirLand’s self-financed Scorpion have stood as warnings to the defense industry, leaving contractors focused only on concepts that receive full financial support from the Pentagon.

That approach comes with financial guarantees through the Defense Department’s annual budgeting process—but often at the expense of long and uncertain timelines. If the system works as intended, the process generally involves a lengthy competitive process, which includes a multiyear technology maturation and risk-reduction phase. That is typically followed by a 5-8-year engineering and manufacturing development phase, leading to operational testing and finally approval for entry into service.