Is China Already Flying Its Third Sixth-Generation Fighter? And what exactly is this “loyal wingman” the internet can’t stop talking about?

Over the past week, grainy photos of a never-before-seen Chinese aircraft have ricocheted across social media.

Officially, no one is saying a word—Beijing’s standard radio silence whenever something sensitive appears online—so we will respect the quiet until the plane taxis onto a real runway.

What we can do today is unpack the broader idea these photos hint at: the U.S. Air Force concept called Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA—better known to the public as “loyal wingmen.” Where did the idea come from, how mature is it, and where is it headed?

1. Birth of the loyal wingman
   After 2010 the Pentagon watched China and Russia knit together dense webs of radars, missiles and electronic-warfare systems designed to keep U.S. forces at arm’s length. Surviving inside those bubbles meant changing the way air power is packaged. In parallel, rapid progress in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big-data analytics made it clear that human pilots alone could no longer process the volume of information a modern fight would throw at them.

   

The answer: blend manned and unmanned platforms, let the machines handle the grunt work, and keep humans for the decisions that truly matter. Because the Air Force is the most tech-intensive service, it became the natural first customer for what it now calls CCA—aircraft that fly, fight and die alongside a human “mother ship.”

2. What the U.S. system looks like
   Think of America’s future air wing as a three-layer cake.

   

• Ground operations center
  A super-computer farm on the ground digests the big picture, writes the day’s game plan and beams it skyward. The center can re-plan the entire battle in seconds if the enemy changes the chessboard.

  
• The quarterback in the sky
  A large, crewed fighter—today an F-35A Block 4, tomorrow the still-secret NGAD sixth-generation fighter—carries its own mini-data-center. From the cockpit, the human flight lead breaks the ground plan into bite-sized tasks and hands them off to drones. Should communications jam or satellites blink out, the manned jet can still run the fight locally.

  
• The drones themselves (the “loyal wingmen”)
  These are fast, stealthy and cheap enough to be attritable. They lug sensors, jammers and missiles into contested airspace so the human jet doesn’t have to. Some will scout, some will jam, some will act as airborne magazines, firing their missiles on cue from the manned lead.

  

In March 2023 Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall put numbers on the vision: at least 1,000 CCAs—two for every NGAD and two for each of 300 Block 4 F-35As. By May 2025 two prototypes were already in flight test: Anduril’s YFQ-44A “Fury” and General Atomics’ YFQ-42A.

Key design goals:

• Distributed operations—spread capability across many small nodes instead of a few exquisite ones.
• Plug-and-play payloads—swap sensors or weapons between sorties the way apps are swapped on a phone.
• Built-in redundancy—lose a drone, not the mission.
• High autonomy—AI handles formation flying, sensor fusion and even some target decisions, freeing the human for strategy.

  

3. China’s path—faster and wider
   American strategists drew the blueprint, but Beijing is already pouring concrete. While the U.S. sixth-generation NGAD is still mostly PowerPoint, Chinese prototypes are reportedly in the air and iterating at break-neck speed.

   

Energy and computing power are the choke points. A fifth-generation fighter simply cannot spare enough electricity or cooling to quarterback a large drone swarm; a sixth-generation airframe, by contrast, is designed from the wheels up to be a flying server farm. With a new-generation platform already flying, China has removed that bottleneck.

Equally important is the modular philosophy Chinese engineers now talk about openly: airframes built like Lego, able to be re-configured for new missions in weeks rather than years. That opens the door to rapid spiral development—exactly the “digital century-series” dream the U.S. Air Force keeps promising but has not yet delivered.

Expect to see a family of Chinese CCAs:

• Expendable decoys that double as cruise missiles.
• Sensor trucks that orbit quietly and feed targeting data.
• Missile-hauling “arsenal” drones.
• Eventually, fully autonomous air-superiority drones able to dogfight on their own.

  

In short, the loyal-wingman concept may have been invented in America, but China seems determined to perfect it first. The next few air-show seasons could be full of surprises.