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A Boeing MQ-28 at this year's ILA Berlin air show.
Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
BERLIN—In a step demonstrating a new level of interoperability due to government-owned interfaces, U.S. and Australian fighter pilots will have the technical ability to take turns flying the same MQ-28, a Boeing official says.
That seamless approach to operating collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) is the result of a five-year-old agreement between the Royal Australian Air Force and the U.S. Air Force, Glenn Ferguson, Boeing’s director of the MQ-28 program, told Aviation Week in a July 11 interview here.
“Your CCA is my CCA,” Ferguson said. “If you turn up to an [operational] environment, an MQ-28 can be picked up by a U.S. asset or a UK asset, whatever it is, and be used without having to worry about whether you are using a different standard.”
Ferguson added that both countries and industries have been working on that capability since 2021, the year Australia, the UK and the U.S. formed the trilateral AUKUS pact. Pillar II of AUKUS includes a provision to collaborate on CCAs, among other defense technologies.
“What I can tell you from that observation is that there's a very strong desire for all of us to be interoperable,” Ferguson said. “Therefore, everything we do, every behavior you see out of the Australian and U.S. government, you can almost trace back to this desire to be interoperable.”
The U.S. Agile Development Office, which is managing the Boeing F-47 and CCA programs, provided a government reference architecture (GRA) to Australia, sharing the standards that define the requirements for common interfaces.
When an MQ-28 fired an AIM-120 missile at a flying target on Dec. 9, Boeing also demonstrated that the GRA-defined common interfaces work on the Australian-owned CCA.
“We tested those GRAs in the weapons demonstration because we used GRA-aligned software [and] GRA-aligned hardware,” Ferguson said.
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