WRAITH

Mission

WRAITH is designed to be the first thing that enters a defended volume and the last thing anyone is willing to lose.

It flies as a delegated element of a crewed formation — nominally an F-35A — carrying air-to-air, electronic attack, ISR, decoy or fuel in the same bay, and it completes the mission with the datalink dead, the GPS constellation denied, and no uplink of any kind. Group 5 airframe, one 8,000 lbf-class unaugmented turbofan, 830 nautical miles of combat radius with two AIM-120D internal, and no runway requirement.

It is not a pilot replacement. The captain in the F-35A remains the tactical authority and the legal authority. WRAITH is what he sends sixty miles in front of himself so that he does not have to go there.

830nm Combat radius, 2 × AIM-120D internal

6.4h Endurance, clean, unrefueled

92ft³ Modular mission bay, 40 min swap

60ft Rail length to launch — no runway

21$M Unit cost target at rate

Specification

WRAITH parameters

Every figure below is a design target. The ones we do not yet own with test evidence are called out in the notes and in the open-risk list.

Configuration
Class	Group 5 CCA, Increment 2
Configuration	Cranked delta with twin canted V-tails, dorsal flush intake, shielded over-wing exhaust
Length	41.2 ft (12.56 m)
Span, deployed	29.8 ft (9.08 m)
Span, folded	15.2 ft (4.63 m) — outer panels fold at the crank
Height, gear down	12.1 ft (3.69 m) — set by the tail fins, not the fuselage
Wing area	452 ft² (42.0 m²)
Aspect ratio	1.96
Leading-edge sweep	47° inboard / 32° outboard of the crank
Tail	2 all-moving fins, canted 40° outboard, 46 ft² each
Control surfaces	4 elevons + 2 all-moving canted fins
Landing gear	Retractable tricycle — single nose wheel, two mains at the wing root

Weights
Maximum takeoff weight	18,400 lb (8,346 kg)
Operating empty weight	8,900 lb (4,037 kg)
Internal fuel	6,800 lb (3,084 kg) F-24 / JP-8
Fuel fraction	0.370
Mission bay payload, max	2,700 lb (1,225 kg)
Single station limit	1,500 lb (680 kg)
Typical combat weight	13,400 lb, 50% fuel and 2 × AAM
Wing loading at MTOW	40.7 lb/ft² (199 kg/m²)

Propulsion
Powerplant	1 × 8,000 lbf-class turbofan, FADEC, unaugmented
Bypass ratio	0.6, non-afterburning
Fan diameter / length	26 in / 88 in
Engine dry weight	1,120 lb
TSFC at cruise	0.78 lb/lbf·h at 0.75 M / 35,000 ft
Thrust-to-weight, MTOW	0.266
Thrust-to-weight, combat	0.366
Inlet	Dorsal flush, serpentine S-duct, no line of sight to the fan face
Exhaust	2D shielded slot over the trailing edge, bypass film cooling
Electrical	2 × 90 kVA, 270 VDC main bus, 28 VDC essential

Performance
Combat radius	830 nm with 2 × AIM-120D internal
Endurance	6.4 h clean, unrefueled
Service ceiling	48,000 ft
Max sustained	0.92 M / 5.5 g
Structural limit	−3.0 to +9.0 g — no pilot to break
Best cruise	0.75 M / 38,000 ft
Loiter	0.58 M / 41,000 ft, 1,060 lb/h average
Approach speed	122 KIAS at 11,000 lb
Landing ground roll	2,900 ft dry; 1,850 ft with the ribbon chute
Rough field	3,000 ft semi-prepared surface, CBR 6
Operational alpha limit	24°, dorsal-intake constrained

Payload, comms, autonomy
Mission bay	92 ft³ modular — AAM, EW, ISR, decoy or fuel
Bay envelope	14.0 × 2.8 × 2.35 ft, two longitudinal stations
Module swap	40 min on the flight line, 3 people, one 2-ton bay lift
Datalink	MADL-native two-way with F-35; Link 16; TTNT
MADL apertures	6 conformal — spherical less a 9° aft cone
Silent mode	Intent-only optical crosslink, 1550 nm, 4.8 kbit/s, zero RF emission
Autonomy	REVENANT CORE — fights fully in EMCON with zero uplink
Mission compute	2 × 128 TOPS INT8 sustained at 260 W, plus a 40 W survival node
Flight control	Quad-redundant fly-by-wire, 400 Hz, dissimilar backup lane
Navigation	Inertial, celestial, terrain-referenced and visual-inertial. GPS is an input, never a dependency.
Accountability	REVENANT LEDGER writer, tamper-responding key store, 2.1 GB per 6.4 h sortie

Program & cost
Unit cost target	$21M at rate
Production rate	300 per year from FORGE-1
First article	Q3 2028, FORGE-1 Savannah
First flight, target	Q1 2029
Cost per flight hour	$4,900 — F-35A is publicly reported near $33,000
Touch labor at rate	3,900 h per airframe
Design service life	6,000 flight hours / 4,000 cycles
Unique part count	≈2,300 — a crewed fighter of this class is near 11,000

Crewed – uncrewed teaming

The captain and his wingman

A USAF captain in an F-35A. A WRAITH line abreast at a thousand feet of separation, high over a coastline at dawn. The WRAITH goes first into the threat ring. The captain never leaves the tanker track.

The captain does not fly the WRAITH. He has no stick for it, no throttle for it, and no second set of instruments. He delegates to it. From the panoramic cockpit display he selects a play, sets a geofence and a time box, and issues a scoped engagement authorization token. Three interactions. About four seconds of head-down time.

The token names what may be engaged, inside what volume, during what window, under what identification criteria. It is signed with the captain's cryptographic identity and written into REVENANT LEDGER on both aircraft before the element pushes. From that moment WRAITH can fight without asking — because it already asked, and the ledger proves when, by whom, and with what limits.

The number the program actually lives or dies on is crew workload: how much additional head-down time a two-ship WRAITH element costs its captain per engagement cycle. We have not measured it. Doing so requires a simulator campaign with current fighter aircrew that we have neither run nor commissioned, and it is the first thing we would want a Government partner to fund, because a number we generate about our own workload burden is worth very little.

Concept of operations

One sortie, start to finish

Launch from a dispersed site, push sixty miles ahead of the crewed aircraft, fight in EMCON under a pre-signed authority, recover to something that is not an airfield.

Five phases

Join and delegate

WRAITH launches from a dispersed site and joins the package on the tanker track. The captain selects a play, sets a geofence and a time box, and signs a scoped engagement authorization. Both aircraft write the token into LEDGER before the element pushes.
The push

WRAITH accelerates ahead and low, opening to 60 nm in front of the crewed aircraft, and enters the threat ring first. It is the sensor, the shooter and the target. The F-35A stays outside, receiving a MADL track picture from an aircraft sixty miles closer to the problem. The captain's aircraft has not radiated.
EMCON

The adversary IADS comes up. WRAITH transitions to silent mode: RF transmit is inhibited by a physical interlock in power distribution, not by software, and the inhibit state is LEDGER-signed. Coordination runs over the optical crosslink at 4.8 kbit/s — intent, not imagery. The pre-signed token is still valid, so the aircraft prosecutes inside its scope with no uplink at all.
Engage or expire

A track that meets the identification criteria, inside the geofence, inside the time box, is engaged, and the full decision chain is hash-chained at the edge. A token that expires while the link is down ends the engagement: WRAITH disengages and egresses.
Recover and debrief

Conventional landing, arrested landing on a 2,400 ft strip, or parafoil recovery to any clear 120 m square. The ledger export reaches the squadron debrief system in about six minutes and the sortie is reconstructed decision by decision.

Launch & recovery

A runway is a coordinate

A runway has a surveyed heading, a published length and a known maximum on ground. It is the easiest target set in the theater and it is the first one serviced.

Rail launch

Emplace · 22 min

The cradle arrives on any 40 ft ISO flatrack chassis, rail well car or C-17 pallet position. Four people and one 10-ton rough-terrain forklift level it to within 2°. It works on a highway, a hardstand, a parking apron, or the deck of an LSD.
Mate · 6 min

The aircraft is lifted onto the cradle. Outer wing panels unfold at the crank and pin. Two people, hand tools, no power, no alignment fixture.
Arm the boost · 14 min

Four solid boosters, 15,700 lbf each, 2.6 s burn, 163,000 lbf·s total impulse. They mount to the expendable cradle frame, not to the airframe — WRAITH carries no booster attachment, no fairing and no jettison mechanism.
Elevate and start

Cradle to 12°. Cold start on internal battery and APU, engine to military power, FADEC confirms. LEDGER signs the launch authorization and the loaded ROE token. This is the last human decision until recovery.
Boost · 2.9 s

3.4 g axial, 1.9 g normal. Cradle release at 2.9 s; boosters and frame fall clear inside 180 m. End of boost: 168 KEAS at 240 ft AGL, climbing.
Total · 44 min

Cold vehicle on a road to gear in the well, with a trained four-person crew. Best time on the test site is 31 minutes.

Recovery options
Mode	Requirement	Result
Conventional	3,000 ft, dry, CBR 6 or better	2,900 ft roll; 1,850 ft with the ribbon chute
Arrested	MK-64 land-based gear, tailhook fitted	Engagement to 130 kt, 950 ft runout, roll-on from a 2,400 ft strip
Parafoil	Any clear 120 × 120 m unimproved surface	640 ft² canopy at 8,000 ft AGL / 160 KIAS, 21 ft/s, airbag to under 8 g

What it costs, and what does not fit

The 3.4 g launch transient drives 310 lb of titanium keel and cradle interface that no other flight condition requires. That 310 lb is worth about 40 nm of combat radius, on every sortie, including the ones that start from a runway. Consumables are roughly $50,000 a launch — $41,000 in boosters, $9,000 in the expendable cradle frame. We paid all of it on purpose.

WRAITH does not fit inside a closed 40 ft ISO box and we do not claim it does. The launcher does. The aircraft moves three per C-17A with outer panels folded — 15.2 ft against an 18 ft cargo bay — or by road on a 53 ft lowboy under a routine over-width permit, or by rail. Folded span is the figure that governs every one of those modes, so folded span is the figure we publish.

Parafoil recovery is for a battle-damaged or fuel-starved airframe. In test, four of five parafoil recoveries returned the aircraft to flight status inside 72 hours; the fifth needed an engine change after a borescope finding. Every parafoil recovery requires a borescope. Five events is an anecdote with a number on it, not a statistic.

Mission bay

The bay is the product

The airframe is a truck for it. 92 ft³, two longitudinal stations, 2,700 lb total and 1,500 lb per station.

Module set
Module	Contents	Weight
AAM-2	2 × AIM-120D-3 on trapeze launchers — the 830 nm reference loadout	780 lb
AAM-4S	4 × AIM-9X Block II on rotary rails — counter-cruise and counter-UAS	620 lb
SDB-6	6 × GBU-53/B StormBreaker — moving-target strike	1,470 lb
ARM-2	2 × AGM-88G AARGM-ER — SEAD, both stations	2,200 lb
EW-1	REQUIEM-A pod carried internally — 14 kW draw, 9 kW rejection	1,180 lb
ISR-1	AESA SAR/GMTI side panels, EO/MWIR ball, wideband ESM	1,340 lb
DECOY-6	6 × POLTERGEIST-150 in decoy fit — presents six more Group 5 signatures	1,690 lb
TANK-1	Conformal bay tank, 1,900 lb of fuel, +280 nm radius, single station	1,900 lb

Datalink & EMCON

Two ways to talk. One emits nothing.

A networked link when quiet is enough. An optical intent channel when the only acceptable emission is none — and a directional weather channel so that cloud changes the waveform rather than the plan.

MADL, natively

MADL is the F-35's directional, low-probability-of-intercept datalink. It is narrow-beam and it is quiet, which is why WRAITH is built around it instead of around Link 16.

Six conformal apertures — two dorsal, two ventral, two lateral — giving spherical coverage less a 9° cone directly aft. Electronic steering; no gimbal, no bulge.
1.4 s link acquisition from a cued position, maintained to 90 nm in a line-abreast geometry. Sensor-to-display track correlation latency 180 ms.
WRAITH appears as a native MADL participant, not as a gateway hanging off one. On the captain's tactical situation display it is a member of the flight.

There is no new box in his jet, no new switch, no new display and no OFP change beyond a Block 4 data load. That is the entire procurement argument, and it is worth stating flatly: the fastest way to field a CCA is to require nothing of the crewed fleet. Every program that has asked a fighter wing to install hardware has slipped years on the installation, not on the technology.

On provisioning: the MADL waveform and its cryptography are government-controlled, so the terminal is GFE and the interface is furnished, not bought. We designed for that rather than around it. MADL is an installed option, not a dependency: the teaming baseline is Link 16 plus the FANTOM directional channel below, both of which we control, and WRAITH is a useful flight member on either. Where MADL is furnished, it is the preferred path because it is the quietest. Where it is not, nothing about the mission changes except which waveform carries the track. A directional link also needs pointing knowledge; if the two aircraft lose each other, reacquisition takes up to 40 s of directed search across pre-agreed boxes. Directional links are quiet because they are narrow. You do not get one property without the other.

Silent mode

Optical crosslink
Wavelength	1550 nm, eye-safe band
Transmit power	250 mW average
Apertures	4 conformal, coarse pointing ±60°, MEMS fast-steering fine pointing
Range, clear air	24 nm
Range, 3 km visibility	9 nm
Effective data rate	4.8 kbit/s
Acquisition, cold / warm	6 s / 0.9 s
RF emission in silent mode	None — hardware interlock in power distribution
Weather channel	94 GHz directional, 1.8° beam, frequency-hopped
Range in or behind cloud	14 nm on the weather channel
Weather-channel data rate	4.8 kbit/s — identical payload, no imagery
Optical → weather handover	Automatic, 400 ms, signed into REVENANT LEDGER

Why 4.8 kbit/s and not 4.8 Mbit/s

Because bandwidth is the enemy of EMCON discipline. Give an operator a video pipe and he will use it, and the moment the optical link drops he will reach for the radio. The channel carries track updates, ROE state, formation intent and a heartbeat. It cannot carry an image, so nobody plans a mission that depends on one, so nobody transmits when it drops. The constraint is the feature.

1550 nm does not penetrate cloud or heavy rain, and in a Pacific winter that is a large fraction of days. So the aircraft does not have one quiet link, it has two, and it steps between them without asking: optical while the air is clear, and a 94 GHz directional channel when it is not. The weather channel carries the identical 4.8 kbit/s payload — same track updates, same ROE state, still no imagery — so the discipline the constraint buys survives the weather that used to break it.

Three states, chosen by the aircraft

SILENT — optical only. RF transmit is held down by a physical interlock in power distribution, not by software. Zero RF emission, and the interlock state is signed.
QUIET — the 94 GHz channel, entered only when weather closes the optical path. A 1.8° pencil beam between two known cooperating positions is hard to intercept for a geometric reason rather than a statistical one: an receiver off the beam axis sees nothing to detect, whatever its sensitivity. This is the same property that makes a directional datalink quiet in the first place.
NETWORKED — Link 16, and MADL where it is furnished. Used when EMCON permits and the flight wants the wider picture.

QUIET is an emission and we will not pretend otherwise. It is a narrow, hopped, short-dwell one aimed at an aircraft whose position is already known to us, which is a materially different exposure from a broadcast — but it is not the zero of SILENT, and the mission planner is shown which state the flight is in.

Engineering rationale

Why it is built this way

Six decisions, and the price we agreed to pay for each one.

One unaugmented engine

An afterburner buys acceleration and costs fuel flow, infrared signature, weight, cost and a whole maintenance discipline. A CCA optimized to arrive first and stay long does not need it. 8,000 lbf dry gives 0.62 thrust-to-weight at combat weight, a 0.75 M cruise and a 6.4 hour clean endurance. The tradeoff: we cannot supercruise and we cannot run down a fighter that decides to leave. We do not pretend otherwise.

Canted tails, dorsal intake

Two all-moving fins canted 40° outboard, and a shielded over-wing exhaust. A tailless layout would return a little signature, and we looked hard at it — but yaw authority at low dynamic pressure is what you need on an unimproved-surface recovery, and split drag rudders do not give you enough of it when the approach goes wrong. The tradeoff: a dorsal intake starves at high angle of attack. Our operational alpha limit is 24° against the 32° the wing would otherwise give us — a real loss of nose authority in a close fight, accepted because a CCA that gets into a close fight has already had a bad day.

A 40 W survival node

Two 128 TOPS mission computers do sensor fusion and multi-ship coordination. Behind them sits a 40 W single-board computer holding the complete REVENANT CORE world model, mission plan and ROE state, able to fly and fight the aircraft alone. Forty watts is the canon CORE envelope, and that is not a coincidence: the smallest node in the arsenal and the last surviving lane on the flagship run the same binary. The tradeoff: on the survival node the aircraft loses fusion fidelity and multi-ship coordination. It keeps flight, navigation, the ROE engine and the ledger writer.

Learned above, deterministic below

The learned components of the autonomy stack sit above a hard boundary and can only issue trajectory and effect requests. They cannot command a control surface. Below that boundary is quad-redundant fly-by-wire at 400 Hz with a dissimilar backup lane on different silicon and a different toolchain, DO-178C traceable. The tradeoff: the tactical layer sometimes asks for a maneuver the deterministic layer will not fly, and the deterministic layer wins. We lose performance in the corners. It is the only architecture anyone is going to certify this decade.

310 lb of keel we did not want

Rail launch puts 3.4 g of axial load through a structure no other flight condition loads that way. It costs a titanium keel through the mission bay and about 40 nm of combat radius on every sortie, forever. The tradeoff was deliberate: a customer who never intends to disperse is buying 40 nm of nothing. A customer who does is buying the ability to generate sorties on day three of a Pacific fight, when the airfields are craters.

Fuel as the heat sink

Peak thermal load with a REQUIEM-A pod in the bay is 21 kW, rejected to the fuel and then to a ram-air exchanger. That makes thermal margin a function of how much fuel is left, so the aircraft plans its electronic-attack duty cycle against its own fuel state. The tradeoff: below 900 lb remaining the pod caps at 45% duty. The alternative was a dedicated heat exchanger and 40 lb out of the bay budget.

The two decisions

Sixty feet of rail, and no radio

The first decision is that WRAITH does not need a runway. It launches off a 60 ft rail that emplaces in 22 minutes with four people and one 10-ton forklift, on a highway, a hardstand, a parking apron or the deck of an LSD. Cold vehicle on a road to gear in the well is 44 minutes; the best time on the test site is 31. The boosters mount to the expendable cradle frame and not to the airframe, so the aircraft carries no booster attachment, no fairing and no jettison mechanism. The counter-air problem it presents is not a list of surveyed fields with published headings and a known maximum on ground — it is a sixty-foot cradle that was somewhere else yesterday. The bill for that is 310 lb of titanium keel, about 40 nm of combat radius on every sortie including the ones that start from a runway, and roughly $50,000 a launch in consumables. We priced it before we drew the keel and we paid it on purpose.

The second decision is that it can fight without emitting. In silent mode, RF transmit is inhibited by a physical interlock in power distribution rather than by software, and the inhibit state is signed into REVENANT LEDGER. Coordination runs on a 1550 nm optical crosslink at 4.8 kbit/s — 24 nm in clear air, 9 nm at 3 km visibility, with a 94 GHz directional channel taking over at 14 nm when cloud closes the optical path. Either way the payload is intent and never imagery, which is the point: nobody builds a plan around a pipe that cannot show him a picture, so nobody reaches for the radio when it drops. The autonomy is architected to fight with no uplink rather than to tolerate a degraded one, and every classification and every release is hash-chained and replayable through REVENANT LEDGER — the difference between an autonomous engagement a combatant commander can authorize and one his lawyer will not let him authorize.

WRAITH has not flown. First flight is targeted for Q1 2029, and every figure on this page is a design target until it does.

Revenant Ledger

Program candor

Open engineering risks

A spec sheet with no bad news in it is a brochure, and nobody buys airplanes from a brochure.

Seven of them

Propulsion is the schedule. There is no 8,000 lbf-class unaugmented turbofan in production that simultaneously meets our fuel consumption, cost and rate targets. We are dual-sourcing against derivatives of existing business-jet cores. This is risk number one, it is the same risk every CCA program in the world has, and anyone who says otherwise has not tried to buy 300 engines a year.
MADL is furnished, not bought. The waveform and its cryptography are government-controlled, so we designed it as an installed option rather than a dependency — Link 16 and the FANTOM directional channel are the teaming baseline and both are ours. The residual risk is schedule on a GFE terminal, not capability.
There is no accepted airworthiness standard for a learned flight-critical function. We have architected around its absence with a deterministic inner loop. That is a defensible architecture. It is not an approved one, because no approval process exists yet.
Signature and rough-field operations are in tension and we have not resolved it. Every landing on a semi-prepared surface abrades the coating. Our budget is one touch-up per 40 unimproved-surface cycles. That number is not proven in the field, and if it turns out to be one per ten, the sustainment case changes materially.
The launch structure penalty is permanent. 310 lb and 40 nm on every sortie, including the ones from a runway.
The four-aircraft span of control is simulator data from a dome, not from a squadron at Nellis. It will move.

All air systems

Poltergeist Carried in DECOY-6. Six additional Group 5 signatures from one bay station.

Requiem Carried in EW-1. Cognitive electronic attack from inside the mission bay.

Revenant CORE, MESH and LEDGER. Command that survives contact.

WRAITH program office

Bring us a threat picture

Signature data, MADL integration detail and classified performance are discussed in a cleared facility. Start here and we will arrange it.

Request a briefing

Every figure on this page is a design target derived from first-principles analysis, not a measured result. WRAITH has not flown. No airframe, test article or flight-test data exists. Where a number here is later measured and comes out worse, we will publish the measured number. No export-controlled information is published on this site.

Key figures

Join and delegate

The push

EMCON

Engage or expire

Recover and debrief

Emplace · 22 min

Mate · 6 min

Arm the boost · 14 min

Elevate and start

Boost · 2.9 s

Total · 44 min