Australia’s Ghost Bat eyes live air-to-air weapons test by end of year

An MQ-28 Ghost Bat drone flies in tests for the Royal Australian Air Force. (Australian Department of Defence)

AVALON AIR SHOW — Australia expects to shoot a live weapon off its MQ-28 Ghost Bat before the end of the year, according to manufacturer Boeing’s defense chief at this year’s Avalon Air Show.

“What we’re going to do this year is, we’re going to accelerate into a weapon shot” from the drone, Boeing Defense, Space & Security interim President and CEO Steve Parker said. The company “is moving forward with the customer and moving towards a weapon shot later this year, or early next year … actual weapon off the aircraft.”

Parker later clarified that the shot “will be air to air … We’ll definitely look at air-ground in the future, but our focus priority is air-to-air. And we’ll talk about what the weapon is in the future, at a future point in time.”

Ghost Bat is the first Australian-designed and built aircraft in more than 50 years, and Canberra is very hopeful that the program will lead to a large export market. It signed a data sharing agreement with the United States in 2023, and at least one Ghost Bat has been spotted in the US.

The company also announced at the show that the MQ-28 had completed its 100th test flight, something Parker said is proof of “maturing” the program. (Parker noted they actually finished the 102nd flight.)

According to the executive, there are eight Block 1 Ghost Bats going through flight tests, with two Block 2 aircraft in production. By the end of the year, he added, there will be 11 Ghost Bats doing live testing.

“The beauty of the Block 1 aircraft is just learning, testing out for all of our autonomy and AI, all of our algorithms and so forth,” Parker said.

Amy List, managing director of Boeing Defence Australia, added that the swap from Block 1 to Block 2 is mostly about making the aircraft more survivable in a contested environment, but that the first wave of testing has led to further findings.

“An example of that is to make sure that the navigation equipment is not able to be easily [defeated]. It’s those sort of upgrades. Through that, we have also learned a number of lessons about how to make the aircraft more producible and how to make it easier for maintainers to get it ready for its mission. And so, there’s a bunch of structural changes that we’re making through it as well to get [ready] for production.”

Interestingly, the company also noted that the MQ-28 will, by the end of the year, fly “operationally relevant missions” with the E-7 Wedgetail and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, both aircraft that are key for Australia and the US — to whom Boeing is hopeful of one day selling the Ghost Bat. (Pat Conroy, a key defense minister, previously said Ghost Bat could also be used with F-18s and P-8s.)

“We’ve got a whole bunch of capability demos,” Parker said. “We’re going to be teamed in sharing data with E-7 and we’re also going to do some things in the US with other platforms as well, which I’ll probably talk about a little bit later, but think about F15EX or things like that. So we’re really looking at, how do we prove out every aspect of what a CCA should be?”

Colin Clark in Australia contributed to this report.