Airbus is advancing its U760 Ravenstorm within Europe’s collaborative combat aircraft plans, adding a larger uncrewed system to the continent’s future air capability work.
The U760 Ravenstorm has been presented as part of Airbus’ broader uncrewed aircraft portfolio, with a one-to-one model shown at ILA Berlin. Airbus describes the aircraft as part of its roadmap toward a scalable family of uncrewed collaborative combat aircraft.
The aircraft has been presented with a wingspan of around 10 metres and a length of around 13 metres, giving it a materially larger profile than earlier wingman-style concepts. Collaborative combat aircraft are intended to operate alongside crewed fighters, extending sensing, electronic attack, decoy, communications, or strike capacity while keeping pilots at a greater distance from some high-risk missions.
Ravenstorm sits within a European defence environment where uncrewed air systems have moved from experimentation into industrial planning. The war in Ukraine has highlighted the operational importance of drones, electronic warfare, sensor disruption, low-cost mass, and rapid software iteration. European air forces are now trying to turn those lessons into deployable systems without becoming entirely dependent on US technology.
Airbus is not alone in the field. Boeing, Helsing, General Atomics, and other companies are developing or presenting wingman aircraft and collaborative combat aircraft concepts for Germany and wider European markets. The competition is likely to be shaped as much by mission systems, autonomy, software sovereignty, and production economics as by the aircraft shape itself.
Autonomy becomes an industrial programme
Collaborative combat aircraft are neither conventional aircraft nor disposable drones. They need enough performance, survivability, payload flexibility, and systems integration to operate in contested airspace, but they also need to be affordable enough to buy in meaningful numbers. That balance is difficult to achieve in any defence programme, and harder still when autonomy, secure communications, and weapons integration are added.
Airbus’ wider European drone activity shows how the company is treating uncrewed systems as a family rather than isolated aircraft. The company’s European drone portfolio brings Ravenstorm into the same industrial discussion as vertical-lift autonomy, tactical UAVs, and collaborative combat aircraft development.
That breadth matters because the production base is shared. Composite structures, actuators, propulsion systems, embedded electronics, secure datalinks, edge processors, sensors, ground stations, simulation tools, and software validation are needed across multiple uncrewed aircraft categories. Scaling one platform can strengthen the supplier base for others, provided programmes are not fragmented into incompatible architectures.
Europe’s future combat air debate also gives Ravenstorm added weight. France and Germany have faced persistent difficulty around the Future Combat Air System, with questions over workshare, fighter development, drone systems, and data networks. Even where a next-generation crewed fighter is delayed or politically strained, uncrewed adjunct systems and mission networks remain urgent.
Control over software and mission systems will be decisive. European governments want sovereign authority over the AI agents, mission software, datalinks, and operational rules that govern these systems. An imported airframe with opaque autonomy would not satisfy that requirement. Industrial sovereignty in collaborative combat aircraft therefore lives in the software stack, the mission system, and the ability to update and certify capability at speed.
Testing infrastructure will also shape delivery. Britain’s large DroneTEX facility in Swindon shows how uncrewed systems need controlled environments for rapid iteration, sensor trials, radio-frequency work, and production-linked validation. Concepts that cannot move through that test-and-scale pipeline will struggle to become useful equipment.
Ravenstorm remains a development programme rather than an operational aircraft, but Airbus is placing industrial weight behind a category that is becoming central to European air power. Collaborative combat aircraft are now a contest over production capacity, sovereign software, mission integration, and cost-controlled autonomy.
