The Boeing MQ-28 Ghost Bat, billed as the first Australian-developed and -produced combat aircraft since the Second World War, is intended to enter service with the Royal Australian Air Force in 2028. Transitioning the aircraft into an operational asset is now in full swing.
As Boeing Australia aims to transition the MQ-28 Ghost Bat collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) into operations with the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in 2028, it is now placing a heavy emphasis on mission systems integration as the aircraft moves closer to becoming an operational asset, Boeing executives briefed at the Farnborough International Airshow (FIA) on 21 July 2026.
Following capability tests done with the RAAF, “the mission systems transition to operations is what matters most”, said Glen Ferguson, the director of the MQ-28 programme director for Boeing in Australia.
“In June last year we flew the find-fix-track-target piece of an air-to-air mission where we tracked two Lear jets,” Ferguson noted. “We combat identified them. We provided a weapons-quality track back across the network, and the only thing that was sent to the MQ-28 was one single command that said ‘Sanitise the airspace’, and it went and did all of it autonomously. It controlled its own CAP [combat air patrol] pattern. It was rotating the CAPs as it needed to. It was sanitising the airspace. Once it identified the tracks, it started correlating them. It started sensor fusing them and posted them back on the network.”
This was followed in December 2025 by a joint Boeing and RAAF exercise in which an MQ-28, teamed with a RAAF E-7A Wedgetail airborne early warning and control aircraft and an F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter, autonomously fired an AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) to destroy an airborne fighter-class target.
Regarding the full air-to-air air kill chain – find-fix-track-target-engage-assess – Ferguson said, “We did the first four of them in the first trial. So, in the second trial, we purposely decided to not do those; we’d already done it. We had an F/A-18 designate and provide the target. We took an offboard target. We put it into the system through the E-7, so the E-7 authorised and gave the target to the MQ-28, and then we autonomously fired the AMRAAM against it, including mid-course guidance. That was all done in eight months because of the digital backbone.”
It is the digital design of MQ-28 that is key, Ferguson stressed. He noted, for example, that while Boeing had by the time of FIA 2026 flown the Ghost Bat platform for around 230 hours and more than 200 hundred sorties, the company has meanwhile flown more than 25,000 hours’ worth of digital tests.
“When we say we’ve done 230 hours, we could have had 1,000 hours in the airframe by now, but we don’t need to,” he explained. “The aircraft doesn’t learn – it’s not an aircraft that has a pilot in it that needs currency – so we only test to validate. We test to validate our operational models; we test to validate our digital models. Once we’ve done that, there’s no point flying anymore. We go back into the digital domain, and we do all our development there.”
Meanwhile, Tim Flood, Boeing Defense, Space & Security’s director of business development and strategy for the UK, Europe and America, asserted that there are three key attributes required in the CCA market today: urgency, capability and sovereignty.
The urgency is driven by the increased threat being felt across Europe by a belligerent Russia that, among other effects, is “driving the need for new capabilities” among which “the collaborative combat aircraft is key”, said Flood.
Regarding capability, Flood asserted that, in terms of CCA programmes wordwide, the MQ-28 “is the most advanced and mature capability on the planet”.
On sovereignty, he said, “We understand that geopolitics is driving the need for sovereign requirements” and that the MQ-28 is “uniquely positioned” to address that sovereignty because its government reference architecture allows for its integration into national systems, while its modular design allows for in-country production, modification, support and sustainment.
Ferguson stressed that the Ghost Bat is very much an Australian product, however. “We designed and developed it in Australia; we are producing it in Australia; we are testing it in Australia,” he said.
He also stressed the pioneering nature of the MQ-28 work. “The reality is no one’s ever done this before, and everything we do we’re doing for the first time,” he said. “No one’s ever fielded a collaborative combat aircraft as a teaming asset, and therefore pretty much every element we develop is a new thing.”
“Our job is to not replace a crewed asset,” Ferguson explained. “We’re not trying to be an uncrewed F-35; we are there to supplement gaps in the kill chain of our crewed assets. And what I mean by that is by having an uncrewed asset that is both cost effective, survivable and lethal, we can take risks with the collaborative combat aircraft that you can’t take with a crewed asset.
“When you deploy, you actually get to deploy further forward, but more importantly you get to distribute your risk across a number of assets. And so for the same price as a fighter, you can get five, six, seven, whatever the number turns out to be, CCAs. You can put them forward another 40 to 50 miles forward and you can spread them across 200 miles to give you massive sensor coverage for effectively the same price as a crewed fighter. And on top of that you take no risk with human life.”
Ferguson stressed that the ‘M’ in the MQ-28 designation stands for ‘multi-role’, noting that the Ghost Bat has capabilities across surveillance, reconnaissance, intelligence, and both defensive and offensive counter-air operations. He added that the missions required of the Ghost Bat by the RAAF had driven the design of the aircraft in its first phases.
In June 2026 at the ILA Berlin Air Show Boeing and Rheinmetall unveiled the new Block 3 Ghost Bat, which will feature internal weapons carriage, beyond-line-of-sight communications and a 25% larger, increased-span wing, allowing it to carry 2,000 lb (907 kg) more payload, thus taking the aircraft’s maximum take-off weight (MTOW from 10,000 lb to 12,000 lb and its maximum payload up to 4,500 lb (2,041 kg).
The Block 3 Ghost Bat’s internal weapons carriage allows it to carry two AMRAAM missiles or four GBU-39/GBU-53 Small Diameter Bombs (SDBs).
When Warsight asked Ferguson about the range of the Block 3 Ghost Bat, he noted that it would certainly exceed the range of the crewed fighters it would operate alongside. Powered by a Williams FJ44-1A turbofan, the current Block 2 Ghost Bat is already stated to have a range exceeding 3,700 km.
Ferguson added that the Block 3 will be fitted for, but not yet with, an aerial refuelling capability, which will allow future iterations of the MQ-28 to significantly extend the platform’s range and endurance even futher.
He also pointed out that Boeing recently timed a turnaround of the aircraft – from when it landed to when it was ready to take off again – at 19 minutes, “so we can generate massive amounts of air combat power and resilience in the airspace through these capabilities”, he said.
Development of the MQ-28 first began in 2017 and the aircraft performed its maiden flight on 27 February 2021. The platform is described as the first Australian-designed and -produced combat aircraft since the Second World War.
Eight pre-production Block 1 MQ-28s were used in a flight test programme that culminated the key demonstrations in 2025 described above.
An initial nine Block 2 MQ-28s are now in production and, once these come online, all eight pre-production Block 1 aircraft will be retired.
Thus far the Australian government has funded a total of 18 MQ-28s: eight Block 1 aircraft, nine Block 2 aircraft and the first Block 3 Ghost Bat.
According to Ferguson, the Australian government has thus far invested AUD 2.4 billion (EUR 1.47 billion) in the MQ-28.
Meanwhile, a recent development included the MQ-28 flying with the US Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) during the large-scale US-led joint exercise ‘Valiant Shield’, which this year took place from 22 June to 1 July across the Philippine Sea, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
This was “about proving our ability to deploy” said Ferguson. “We flew with F-35s and F-15EXs, and we did a forward refuelling with the C-130. But the most important thing was getting into an operational theatre and deploying and operating. It’s the first time anyone’s ever done it [with a CCA], and I think we’re going to do a few more of them over the next few years.”
