Ghost Bat (MQ-28A)

Ghost Bat, formally the MQ-28A, is Boeing’s uncrewed loyal-wingman combat aircraft, developed by Boeing Defence Australia for the Royal Australian Air Force. The programme was launched in 2019 as the Airpower Teaming System, and the first prototype rolled out in Brisbane the following year, with its maiden flight in February 2021 at Woomera. It is the first military aircraft designed and built in Australia in more than half a century, and Canberra has treated it as a national industrial project as much as a capability programme, with initial airframes assigned to No. 6 Squadron and further development phases funded through the current decade.

The airframe is a stealth-shaped, low-observable design roughly 11.7 metres long, powered by a single business-jet-class turbofan. Boeing gives it a range of about 3,700 km, sufficient for extended missions alongside crewed platforms such as the F/A-18F Super Hornet, EA-18G Growler and E-7A Wedgetail. Its defining feature is a modular 2.6-metre nose section that can be swapped between missions to carry different sensor suites, electronic-warfare payloads, or intelligence and surveillance packages. Autonomy is provided by Boeing’s own mission software, which the company describes as enabling the aircraft to conduct teaming tasks — flying formation, sharing sensor tracks, reacting to threats — with a human pilot supervising several aircraft rather than flying one directly. The AI stack is proprietary; Boeing has not publicly disclosed which open-source components sit beneath it, and independent teardowns are not available for a platform still in test.

Only the Royal Australian Air Force has committed to fielding the type. An initial batch of development aircraft has been delivered under the current programme of record, with a production configuration approved by the Commonwealth in 2024 and further options tied to Australia’s Integrated Investment Programme. Boeing has pitched the MQ-28 to the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States, and the aircraft participated in the US Air Force’s Skyborg experiments, but no export contract has been signed. It has not been used in combat.

The Ghost Bat sits in the same category as the US Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft — the Anduril YFQ-44A Fury and the General Atomics YFQ-42A — and the European Remote Carrier concept, but it is further along in flight testing than any of them, and its position as a domestically built platform gives Canberra a lever that neither the American nor European programmes offer their own industrial bases.