Airbus has stopped pursuing its unmanned Wingman concept in favor of “a less exquisite, cheaper design,” the U760 Ravenstorm collaborative combat aircraft, according to a Breaking Defense report by Tim Martin published November 3, 2026, and updated November 5. Airbus says customers asked it to bring forward the date the aircraft can enter service, according to the report.

What Airbus decided

  • Laurent Le Quément, Airbus’s head of future air power and unmanned aerial systems marketing, is quoted by Breaking Defense as saying: “Customers have asked us to bring the need [service entry] forward.”
  • Marco Mehling, Airbus’s chief engineer for system of systems concepts and capabilities, is quoted as saying: “we want still to be ready by the timescales that were initially mentioned.”
  • An update added after publication says Airbus is keeping the option to revisit the Wingman design later, not abandoning it entirely.

What the Ravenstorm is

According to Breaking Defense, the U760 Ravenstorm has a “high subsonic cruise speed” and an internal weapons bay with a capacity of 500 kilograms (about 1,100 pounds). It uses a business jet engine, unlike the Wingman, which was designed around a bespoke engine from Rolls-Royce Deutschland and ITP Aero. The report describes it as an evolution of the “trusted design” of Airbus’s Barracuda demonstrator and as the second of three collaborative combat aircraft designs Airbus is pursuing, alongside the U740 Valkyrie and a third system the article does not name.

Timelines

  • The report says the U740 Valkyrie is being developed to support a German requirement dated 2029, while the Ravenstorm is pushing to enter service in 2032.
  • Le Quément is quoted as saying the original Wingman timeframe was “definitely not early 2030s.” Breaking Defense recalls that Michael Schoellhorn, CEO of Airbus Defence and Space, indicated in 2024 that it was closer to 2040.
  • Breaking Defense says Germany’s 2029 requirement for collaborative combat aircraft is in doubt after Berlin rethought a direct purchase of Boeing MQ-28 Ghost Bat drones.

What the report does not include

The report does not give a price for the Ravenstorm, name a launch customer or say when a prototype will fly. It also does not describe the third design in the family.

Sources and notes

This post is based on Breaking Defense’s report of November 3, 2026, updated November 5. Lens did not read an Airbus announcement, so the aircraft’s specifications, the dates and the quotations come from that report. Lens did not contact Airbus.

Image: A mockup of the Airbus Wingman unmanned combat aircraft at Schönefeld airport, by André Gerwing via Wikimedia Commons, released under CC BY-SA 4.0; cropped. Stand-in photo; it shows the Wingman concept the report says Airbus has set aside, not the Ravenstorm.