Airbus Ravenstorm

Airbus Defence and Space's U760 Ravenstorm is an uncrewed collaborative combat aircraft concept — a stealthy loyal wingman for air-to-air combat, precision strike and electronic warfare, unveiled as a full-scale model at ILA Berlin 2026 and pitched into Germany's post-FCAS combat-drone competition.

Overview

The U760 Ravenstorm is the flagship of Airbus Defence and Space's uncrewed combat-aircraft line — what the company calls an uncrewed collaborative combat aircraft (UCCA), the European term for the collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) or "loyal wingman" class flying in the United States and Australia. Airbus announced it on 9 June 2026, the eve of the ILA Berlin air show, as the centerpiece of a renamed "U"-prefix drone portfolio, and displayed a full-scale 1:1 model on the show floor. The company describes a multi-mission aircraft for precision strike, air-to-air defense with medium- and long-range missiles, and electronic warfare against enemy air defenses.

The essential caveat comes first: the Ravenstorm is a concept with a mock-up, not a flying aircraft. Nothing has flown, no engine has been announced, there is no launch customer, and Airbus's own availability claim is the early 2030s — delivery-ready by 2032, the company told Aviation Week. Its significance is strategic: the unveiling landed the day after the Franco-German-Spanish FCAS fighter program collapsed, and it puts Airbus into a four-way race — against the Boeing–Rheinmetall MQ-28 Ghost Bat, Helsing's CA-1 Europa and General Atomics' Gambit family — for a German collaborative-combat-aircraft order the Luftwaffe wants fielded around 2029.

Development

The Ravenstorm sits on two decades of Airbus uncrewed-combat work that never produced an operational aircraft. The EADS Barracuda demonstrator, begun around 2003 as a classified program, first flew in 2006 and was retired after six test campaigns; the Low Observable UAV Testbed (LOUT) was a secret stealth demonstrator disclosed in 2019 that never flew. At ILA Berlin 2024, Airbus unveiled the "Wingman" concept — a larger fighter-type drone model planned around the Eurofighter's EJ200 engine, with a claimed unit cost of one-third of a crewed fighter. Two years later its status is unclear; the Ravenstorm now occupies its slot in the portfolio.

Airbus frames the Ravenstorm as "the next evolution" in a "roadmap towards a scalable family" of UCCAs, and it runs a deliberate two-track approach. The near-term track is the U740 Valkyrie — a Kratos XQ-58A airframe fitted with Airbus's MARS mission system, which the company aims to deliver as an operational sovereign UCCA to the German Air Force by 2029 for experimentation and Eurofighter teaming; Airbus said in March 2026 it is preparing two Kratos-built aircraft for first flight with a European mission system. The Ravenstorm is the sovereign follow-on: a fully European-designed airframe targeted at service entry early next decade. With the FCAS New Generation Fighter dead after the Dassault–Airbus split, combat drones teamed with existing Eurofighters are the nearest thing Europe has to a next-generation air-combat plan.

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