Project Talon
The Autonomous Wingman
Northrop Grumman Reveals ‘Project Talon’: the Autonomous Wingman
Northrop Grumman unveiled Project Talon, an autonomous aircraft built to fly alongside crewed fighters. As the latest addition to the company’s elite autonomous portfolio, Project Talon represents a paradigm shift in air dominance as an adaptive, collaborative teammate for combat missions.
Project Talon combines greater mission versatility with the most advanced modular manufacturing techniques. This disruptive approach shortens timelines, emphasizing speed and simplicity.
Project Talon advances collaboration between crewed and uncrewed aircraft, acting as a force multiplier to enhance lethality, adaptability and mission effectiveness.
Project Talon expands previous boundaries of collaborative aircraft technology to give U.S. and international customers the ability to project power in dynamic threat environments.
Northrop Grumman has more than 500,000 autonomous flight test hours across seven decades of experience in autonomy. Along with the release of Beacon earlier this year, Northrop Grumman continues to demonstrate it is advancing autonomy with speed and decisive action.
Details on Project Talon
- Project Talon was designed, built and on track to fly in under 24 months.
- The Northrop Grumman autonomous testbed ecosystem, Beacon, accelerated Project Talon, testing its avionics software in real-world environments.
- Project Talon builds on Northrop Grumman’s seven decades of advanced, battle-tested autonomous systems across every domain.
Northrop Grumman is a leading global aerospace and defense technology company. Our pioneering solutions equip our customers with the capabilities they need to connect and protect the world, and push the boundaries of human exploration across the universe. Driven by a shared purpose to solve our customers’ toughest problems, our employees define possible every day.
Next-Generation Autonomous Aircraft
Project Talon represents a paradigm shift in air dominance and showcases our ability to quickly deliver mission-ready autonomy with streamlined manufacturing capabilities and innovative production processes. From the beginning, it has been designed for manufacturing. Its modular design exemplifies how efficient and adaptable manufacturing can meet the rapidly changing requirements of modern military operations, broadening appeal and effectiveness with domestic and international markets.
Speed through Expertise
Project Talon leverages lessons learned from previous efforts and incorporates feedback from various customer sets to ensure future needs are met effectively and quickly.
Speed is the outcome of smart, informed decisions made early, and the consequence of the rigorous preparation that gives us confidence to move fast when it matters.
With Project Talon, we’ve listened, invested, and iterated on our designs to deliver greater value in affordable combat capabilities.
We engineered through anticipating mission needs, investing ahead of demand, and building the digital backbone and manufacturing capacity to move quickly and with clarity.