Monday, June 22, 2026

Türkiye's CCA Surge:

Leonardo and Baykar K-SWARM Trials Show M-346 Evolving into Airborne Command Node for KIZILELMA Unmanned Fighter

Story Link 

How Baykar and TAI Are Outpacing the West in Autonomous Air Combat Teaming

With live crewed-uncrewed flight trials, world-first autonomous BVR kills, and a trans-national production architecture anchored to GCAP, Ankara has moved from drone exporter to architect of the next generation of air warfare.

By: Stephen L Pendergast 
Published: June 22, 2026  
Classification: Open Source / Unclassified

Bottom Line Up Front

Türkiye has executed a rapid and verifiable series of collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) milestones that place it ahead of most Western programs in converting autonomous teaming from concept to live operational demonstration. Baykar's KIZILELMA unmanned fighter became the world's first autonomous jet-powered aircraft to destroy an aerial target with a beyond-visual-range missile (November 2025) and the first to conduct fully autonomous close formation flight with a second armed jet (December 2025). The subsequent K-SWARM live trials in May 2026 showed an Italian M-346 acting as an airborne command node for KIZILELMA, validating a deployable crewed-uncrewed architecture now linked to GCAP development. Simultaneously, TAI's ANKA-3 stealth UCAV completed critical design review and is entering serial production for a Turkish Air Force order expected to exceed 50 aircraft, while Aselsan has activated an Indigenous Flight Datalink (IVDL) connecting the TF KAAN fifth-generation fighter to both KIZILELMA and ANKA-3. Together, these programs constitute an integrated autonomous combat air ecosystem — not a collection of demonstrators — backed by a NATO-connected European production infrastructure through the Leonardo-Baykar LBA Systems joint venture. The pace and breadth of this effort materially challenges US, European, and Chinese assumptions about which nations will shape the doctrine and industrial architecture of autonomous air combat in the 2030s.

On June 22, 2026, Leonardo and Baykar announced the successful completion of the first live K-SWARM trials, confirming that an Italian M-346 jet had commanded and coordinated Baykar's KIZILELMA unmanned fighter through autonomous formation changes, separations, and rejoins over Baykar's Çorlu flight center in Türkiye during May. The announcement distilled months of largely quiet but operationally significant progress into a single headline. Yet the K-SWARM result is better understood not as a breakthrough event but as the latest data point in a deliberate, multi-year Turkish program to build a complete autonomous combat air ecosystem — one that now spans two sovereign defense companies, a newly activated NATO-adjacent production venture, and connections to the highest-profile sixth-generation fighter program in Europe.

The K-SWARM Trials: From Simulator to Sky

The K-SWARM program paired Leonardo's M-346 Fighter Attack variant — configured with a newly integrated onboard avionics suite and a dedicated crewed-uncrewed computing system — with Baykar's KIZILELMA unmanned combat air vehicle. An Italian Air Force T-346A flew as a chase aircraft, applying disciplined flight-test methodology to the complex mixed formation. Following KIZILELMA's autonomous taxi and takeoff, the unmanned fighter rejoined the M-346 in flight using Baykar's Smart Fleet Autonomy algorithms, developed and validated through the company's Hardware-in-the-Loop laboratory at Çorlu before the live phase began.

Once the formation stabilized, the M-346 assumed full command authority. Pilots directed formation changes, separations, and rejoins; KIZILELMA executed each maneuver autonomously and with accurate command response. Critically, the architecture employed supervised autonomy rather than remote piloting: the crewed aircraft retained tactical authority, while the unmanned platform handled complex flight tasks without imposing excessive cockpit workload on the pilot. An advanced radio-frequency data exchange system synchronized mission data between the platforms, protected in real time by Leonardo's GCC Tactical Platform cyber-defense architecture.

"The M-346 acted as a human-controlled airborne command node, while KIZILELMA functioned as an autonomous combat asset responding to pilot direction — autonomy as an extension of pilot authority, not a replacement for it."

Leonardo's preparatory engineering chain was substantial. The company's Avionic and Flight Control Innovation Labs and its PC2LAB product and concept laboratory in Turin developed, modeled, and refined the CUC-T (Crewed/UnCrewed Teaming) algorithms and tactics before the live phase began, linked to an M-346 Full Mission Simulator in Venegono. The result was a validated digital thread from software laboratory to live flight — a process compressed to months rather than years by Baykar's mature autonomy infrastructure and KIZILELMA's advanced onboard AI capabilities.

KIZILELMA: A Fighter-Class Platform, Not a Converted Drone

Understanding why K-SWARM matters requires understanding what KIZILELMA is. Baykar's unmanned fighter is not a surveillance drone with weapons tacked on. The aircraft is a single-engine, low-observable, carrier-capable, jet-powered multirole UCAV with an 8.5-ton maximum takeoff weight, a 1.5-ton payload capacity, a cruise speed of Mach 0.6, and a combat radius of approximately 500 nautical miles. Its canard-delta configuration with internal weapons bays provides both maneuverability and low-observable strike capability. The third production prototype, featuring afterburning propulsion, aerodynamic refinements, and an updated avionics architecture, completed its first flight in September 2024. Mass production began in October 2024, with Baykar Chairman Selçuk Bayraktar stating an objective of more than ten aircraft by 2026.

The platform's combat credibility rests on a dense 2025 test record. On November 20, 2025, KIZILELMA electronically engaged and simulated the destruction of a Turkish Air Force F-16 using its MURAD AESA radar in conjunction with a Gökdoğan beyond-visual-range missile digital kill chain — the first time such a sequence was validated on an unmanned platform. Ten days later, on November 30, Baykar announced that KIZILELMA had executed what the company described as the world's first live autonomous BVR air-to-air kill, destroying a high-speed jet-powered target drone over the Black Sea near Sinop with a Gökdoğan missile guided by MURAD radar — a verified engagement, not a simulation. On December 28, 2025, two KIZILELMA aircraft accomplished the world's first fully autonomous close formation flight by a pair of armed, jet-powered unmanned aircraft, relying entirely on artificial intelligence, onboard sensors, and instantaneous data exchange between airframes.

In May 2026, Baykar signed the first KIZILELMA export agreement, with Indonesian company PT Republik Aero Dirgantara committing to an initial batch of 12 aircraft with options extending to 60, plus local production and maintenance facilities — a signal that international confidence in the platform has reached contract-award level.

ANKA-3: The TAI Stealth Wingman

While KIZILELMA has received the most international attention, the second pillar of Türkiye's autonomous combat air architecture is Turkish Aerospace Industries' ANKA-3 stealth UCAV. The flying-wing platform — 7.9 meters long with a 12.5-meter wingspan and a maximum takeoff weight of 6,500 kilograms — is designed for high-subsonic operations at up to 40,000 feet with approximately ten hours of endurance and a 1,600-kilogram payload. Its configuration with two internal weapon bays enables low-observable strike carriage distinct from the older ANKA family's external-stores approach.

ANKA-3's milestones in the fifteen months preceding this article's publication bracket the trajectory of the program. In October 2024, ANKA-3 became the first drone in history to be controlled by another aircraft in a loyal wingman role, a capability demonstration that preceded K-SWARM by more than a year and used a different crewed-uncrewed architecture. In January 2025, ANKA-3 completed the first internal release of a guided glide bomb — a Tolun small diameter weapon dropped from 20,000 feet at 180 knots — proving low-observable strike capability. In March 2025, the aircraft launched from Mürted Air Base, traveled to the Açıkır Test Range with ANKA providing target designation, and released an Aselsan LGK-82 laser-guided weapon from 10 kilometers at 25,000 feet and 200 knots. In December 2025, ANKA-3's 46th sortie validated critical autopilot and autonomous flight envelope tests, closing the basic flight-control validation phase and opening the door to more demanding autonomous mission profiles.

TAI CEO Mehmet Demiroglu confirmed at SAHA Istanbul 2026 that ANKA-3 has completed its critical design review with the production configuration frozen, and that the Turkish Air Force is expected to order more than 50 aircraft in 2026. At the World Defense Show 2026 in February, TAI unveiled a manned-unmanned teaming concept demonstration integrating the TF KAAN fighter with two ANKA-3 drones in a coordinated takeoff, formation maneuvering, and simulated strike sequence — the clearest public statement yet of Türkiye's intent to field a complete CCA ecosystem around its indigenous fifth-generation fighter. TAI stated that the communication, firing, and guidance links between KAAN and ANKA-3 will be operational before KAAN enters Turkish Air Force service.

Aselsan's IVDL: The Digital Spine

Platform capability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for operational CCA. What distinguishes a coherent autonomous air combat architecture from a collection of impressive demonstrators is the command-and-control fabric connecting them. In June 2025, Aselsan CEO Ahmet Akyol confirmed the activation of Türkiye's Indigenous Flight Datalink (IVDL), a wide-bandwidth, high-throughput, electronic-warfare-resistant datalink enabling real-time communication between the TF KAAN fifth-generation fighter and both KIZILELMA and ANKA-3. The IVDL allows KAAN to function not only as a frontline fighter but as an airborne command-and-control node orchestrating multiple unmanned combat assets simultaneously.

In the intended operational architecture, KAAN would direct KIZILELMA and ANKA-3 to conduct suppression of enemy air defenses, electronic attack, and deep-strike missions while remaining at a survivable standoff distance. KIZILELMA — higher speed and more agile — serves as the close-in air combat and strike teammate; ANKA-3 — lower observable and longer-endurance — handles reconnaissance, electronic warfare, and internal-bay precision strike in contested airspace. Complementing the IVDL are low-observable sensor additions to KAAN itself: Aselsan's TOYGUN electro-optical suite and passive KARAT IRST sensor, which reduce KAAN's RF emissions and extend its survivability in advanced integrated air defense environments.

The GCAP Connection: From Ankara to Rome to London

The industrial architecture surrounding Türkiye's CCA programs extends well beyond national borders. At the 2025 Paris Air Show, Leonardo CEO Roberto Cingolani made explicit the link between KIZILELMA and the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), the trilateral sixth-generation fighter initiative among Italy, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Cingolani stated that Italy was evaluating KIZILELMA alongside unmanned variants of the M-345 and M-346 as candidate loyal wingman platforms for GCAP, and described the M-346/KIZILELMA combination as a "near-term, exportable teaming model built around existing aircraft rather than waiting for sixth-generation platforms."

The formal industrial vehicle for this integration is LBA Systems, a 50-50 joint venture between Leonardo and Baykar formally launched at the Paris Air Show in June 2025. The venture assigns specific production roles to Italian facilities: Leonardo's Grottaglie plant — currently a composite fuselage manufacturer for the Boeing 787 — will undertake composite manufacturing and final assembly of KIZILELMA. The Ronchi dei Legionari facility will handle TB3 naval-variant final assembly with sensor integration. The former Piaggio Aerospace facility at Villanova d'Albenga, which Baykar acquired by the end of 2024, will assemble TB2 and Akinci platforms. Turin concentrates engineering and European airworthiness certification. Rome hosts a multi-domain innovation center focused on command-and-control, ISR networking, autonomy, and data links.

Under the LBA model — summarized by Leonardo as "Baykar's platforms, Leonardo's systems" — Italian industrial content on KIZILELMA includes LEOSS-T electro-optical payloads, BriteStorm compact EW systems, Osprey AESA radars, Skyward IRST sensors, and European-standard data links. The K-SWARM trials demonstrated a proof of concept for this integration architecture at the system level, validating that Leonardo's avionics, cyber defense, and mission computing can function as the CUC-T command layer above Baykar's Smart Fleet Autonomy substrate. This division of labor — European certification, sensor integration, and command-layer software on top of Turkish autonomous airframe capability — could emerge as a replicable model for other European nations seeking CCA capability below the cost and schedule threshold of a clean-sheet program.

Comparative Context: Where Others Stand

The pace of Turkish CCA development stands in contrast to the timeline pressures facing other programs. The U.S. Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft Increment 1 program, having down-selected to General Atomics' YFQ-42A Gambit and Anduril's YFQ-44A Fury in April 2024, completed first flights of both prototype aircraft in August and October 2025, respectively. Both are now in developmental trials at Nellis Air Force Base. A production downselect is planned for 2026, with Increment 2 awards expected in early fiscal year 2026 targeting additional capability — improved stealth, sensors, and integration with B-21 and E-7 platforms. The USAF plans to spend more than $8.9 billion on CCA programs from fiscal 2025 through 2029, with an initial operational capability goal of approximately 2030. The Netherlands signed a letter of intent for CCA participation at the end of 2025 and ordered its first two aircraft in April 2026, marking the first allied purchase. The U.S. Marine Corps separately selected Northrop Grumman and Kratos in January 2026 to develop its first operational CCA, transitioning the XQ-58 Valkyrie from testbed to operational wingman.

Australia's Boeing MQ-28A Ghost Bat program, funded to AUD 4 billion (approximately USD 2.6 billion) in April 2024, has demonstrated controlled flight and interoperability with the E-7A Wedgetail — a single E-7A operator controlling two in-flight Ghost Bats alongside a third digital Ghost Bat — but has not yet demonstrated live autonomous BVR weapons employment or crewed-uncrewed formation control of the sophistication shown in K-SWARM. China publicly revealed four new CCA prototypes at its September 3, 2025 Victory Day parade, including two fighter-size designs apparently powered by WS-10 or WS-15 class turbofans, but their operational autonomy levels remain unknown to outside observers. Russia's Sukhoi S-70 Okhotnik and Kronshtadt Grom programs continue in some form, but the depth of their autonomy integration has not been publicly demonstrated at the level of the Turkish milestones.

The United Kingdom's Autonomy Contributory Platform program has fielded its first demonstrator, StormShroud, with an initial order of 24 platforms entering service in May 2025 to develop teaming and Combat Cloud integration. A Tranche 2 tender is expected in spring 2026, with contract award between 2027 and 2029. France and Germany continue development under the Future Combat Air System program, while Japan's loyal wingman drone program for the F-X fighter remains at early funding stages. In this global context, Türkiye's combination of live BVR weapons demonstration, autonomous formation flight, crewed-uncrewed command validation, and series production commitment — all achieved within an eighteen-month window — represents a tempo that most programs have not matched at the operational demonstration level.

Risks, Constraints, and Open Questions

Türkiye's CCA advances carry significant industrial and strategic dependencies that independent analysts note as material risks. ANKA-3's current production configuration is powered by a Ukrainian Ivchenko-Progress AI-322 turbofan engine, a supply chain complicated — though not yet broken — by the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. TAI CEO Demiroglu stated at SAHA Istanbul that Ukraine has continued to produce and deliver engines under wartime conditions, and identified the domestically developed TEI TF6000 turbofan as a contingency alternative, with a larger variant possible if needed. The eventual twin-engine, domestically powered ANKA-3 variant designed for supersonic performance alongside KAAN remains at the concept phase; the current priority is completing the single-engine configuration. KIZILELMA faces a parallel propulsion question: Baykar has announced a domestic propulsion development effort in part to reduce dependence on subcontractors unable to match production rate demands, but the timeline for domestically powered KIZILELMA variants has not been publicly confirmed.

TF KAAN itself — the intended apex crewed node for the Turkish CCA architecture — is still maturing. Three flight prototypes are in various stages of ground and airborne testing as of mid-2026, with production aircraft deliveries expected by 2028 to 2029. An indigenous engine program, based on TEI's TF-TEN/TF10000, is in early testing. Until KAAN enters service with the IVDL-linked architecture that Aselsan has described, the full autonomous air combat ecosystem exists in validated segments rather than as an integrated operational force. The ANKA-3 June 2025 prototype crash during the Anatolian Eagle exercise also serves as a reminder that flight-test campaigns for complex autonomy-enabled aircraft carry inherent risk, even as the program's overall trajectory has been strongly positive.

Beyond platform maturity, the doctrinal and regulatory dimensions of autonomous air combat remain contested across all programs. What level of human supervision is required for lethal autonomous engagement decisions — the rules of engagement, certification standards, and liability frameworks — will shape how quickly any of these systems can transition from demonstrations to operational deployment. Turkey's supervised-autonomy approach in K-SWARM, which explicitly preserves human tactical authority over lethal decisions, appears designed in part to pre-empt this challenge.

Strategic Implications

The broader significance of Türkiye's CCA surge extends beyond platform performance. Ankara has used its drone program as an instrument of strategic autonomy — reducing dependence on Western weapons suppliers, generating substantial export revenues, and building industrial leverage with NATO allies — since the TB2's combat debut in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. The CCA programs represent an escalation of that strategy into the highest tier of airpower technology, at a moment when Türkiye's relationship with the F-35 program remains severed following its 2019 S-400 purchase from Russia.

The LBA Systems architecture is particularly notable in this context. By embedding KIZILELMA production inside Italy's aerospace industrial base, coupling it to European airworthiness certification, and linking it to GCAP development data, Baykar and Leonardo have created a pathway through which a Turkish-origin UCAV could eventually serve as a loyal wingman for a sixth-generation fighter operated by NATO allies who have no political relationship with Ankara sufficient to justify a bilateral arms purchase. Italy provides the NATO wrapper; Baykar provides the unmanned platform; GCAP provides the operational requirement. Whether KIZILELMA ultimately enters GCAP's CCA selection — a decision not yet made — is secondary to the fact that the industrial and technical foundations for that possibility are now being actively constructed.

For air force planners in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Gulf, the implication is straightforward: Türkiye's autonomous combat air ecosystem is no longer a future program to be monitored. It is an extant, operationally demonstrable capability being actively exported, industrially embedded in NATO-aligned production networks, and linked to the most significant sixth-generation fighter program outside the United States. The K-SWARM trials are not an endpoint; they are the first public proof of a command architecture that Leonardo has already described as a foundation for future GCAP combat air operations. The next phase of trials, expected to introduce multi-aircraft coordination, sensor tasking, target handoff, and dynamic mission replanning, will determine how rapidly that architecture can evolve from formation control to genuine mission-level autonomy.

Verified Sources and Formal Citations

  1. Leonardo S.p.A. Press Release. "Leonardo and Baykar Set Major Milestone for Advanced Crewed/Uncrewed Capability Development with Successful First K-SWARM Live Trials." June 22, 2026.
    https://www.leonardo.com/en/press-release-detail/-/detail/22-06-2026-leonardo-and-baykar-set-major-milestone-for-advanced-crewed-uncrewed-capability-development-with-successful-first-k-swarm-live-trials
  2. Army Recognition / Nicanci, Teoman S. "Leonardo and Baykar K-SWARM Trials Show M-346 Evolving into Airborne Command Node for KIZILELMA Unmanned Fighter." June 22, 2026.
    https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2026/
  3. The Defense News. "Leonardo to Launch Manned-Unmanned Teaming Trials with M-346F and KIZILELMA in 2026." March 23, 2026.
    https://www.thedefensenews.com/news-details/Leonardo-to-Launch-Manned-Unmanned-Teaming-Trials-with-M-346F-and-KIZILELMA-in-2026/
  4. Army Recognition. "Leonardo's M-346 Light Attack Fighter to Control Baykar's Two KIZILELMA Combat Drones in Loyal Wingman Trial." March 23, 2026.
    https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2026/leonardos-m-346-light-attack-fighter-to-control-baykars-two-kizilelma-combat-drones-in-loyal-wingman-trial
  5. Army Recognition. "Türkiye's Kizilelma Unmanned Fighter Executes World-First Beyond Visual Range Air-to-Air Strike." December 1, 2025.
    https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2025/tuerkiyes-kizilelma-unmanned-fighter-executes-world-first-beyond-visual-range-air-to-air-strike
  6. Interesting Engineering / Young, Chris. "Turkey Stages World's First Autonomous Jet Dogfight in Historic Test." December 30, 2025.
    https://interestingengineering.com/military/worlds-first-autonomous-formation-flight
  7. Army Recognition. "Türkiye's Aselsan Links KAAN Stealth Fighter with ANKA-3 and KIZILELMA Drones for Manned-Unmanned Teaming." June 19, 2025.
    https://armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2025/tuerkiyes-aselsan-links-kaan-stealth-fighter-with-anka-3-and-kizilelma-drones-for-manned-unmanned-teaming
  8. Army Recognition. "Türkiye Unveils Autonomous Wingman Concept Linking KAAN Fighter with ANKA III Drones." World Defense Show 2026 coverage, February 2026.
    https://www.armyrecognition.com/archives/archives-defense-exhibitions/2026-archives-news-defense-exhibitions/world-defense-show-2026/
  9. Migflug / Defense Analysis. "Turkey Pairs the KAAN With Two Robot Wingmen." World Defense Show 2026.
    https://migflug.com/jetflights/turkey-kaan-anka-iii-manned-unmanned-teaming-world-defense-show-2026/
  10. Army Recognition. "Türkiye's ANKA III Flying Wing Stealth Drone Reaches Critical Milestone in Autonomous Capability." December 9, 2025.
    https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2025/tuerkiyes-anka-iii-flying-wing-stealth-drone-reaches-critical-milestone-in-autonomous-capability
  11. Türkiye Today. "TAI Finalizes ANKA-3 Design; Turkish Air Force to Order Over 50 Aircraft in 2026." January 24, 2026.
    https://www.turkiyetoday.com/nation/tai-finalizes-anka-3-design-turkish-air-force-to-order-over-50-aircraft-in-2026-3213467
  12. Air Force Technology. "ANKA III UCAV, Turkey." Updated February 18, 2026.
    https://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/anka-iii-ucav-turkey/
  13. Wikipedia. "TAI Anka-3." Accessed June 22, 2026.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAI_Anka-3
  14. Wikipedia. "Bayraktar Kızılelma." Accessed June 22, 2026.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayraktar_K%C4%B1z%C4%B1lelma
  15. The Aviationist / Satam, Parth. "LBA Systems to Build TB2, TB3, Akinci and Kizilelma UCAVs in Italy." November 9, 2025.
    https://theaviationist.com/2025/11/09/lba-systems-to-build-ucavs-in-italy/
  16. FlightGlobal. "Leonardo-Baykar Joint Venture to Build Kizilelma Fighters and UAVs at Three Italian Plants." November 7, 2025.
    https://www.flightglobal.com/military-uavs/leonardo-to-build-baykar-kizilelma-uncrewed-fighter-at-grottaglie-factory-under-lba-systems-plan/165190.article
  17. EDR Magazine. "PAS 2025 — LBA Systems: Leonardo and Baykar Join Forces to Expand Their Footprint on the UAV Market." June 19, 2025.
    https://www.edrmagazine.eu/pas-2025-lba-systems-leonardo-and-baykar-join-forces-to-expand-their-footprint-on-the-uav-market
  18. European Security & Defence / Dean, Sidney E. "CCAs, RCs, Loyal Wingmen and Effectors: Developing Unmanned Systems for the Future Air Superiority Team." November 13, 2025.
    https://euro-sd.com/2025/11/articles/technology/47629/ccas-rcs-loyal-wingmen-and-effectors-developing-unmanned-systems-for-the-future-air-superiority-team/
  19. Air Force Technology. "Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), US." Updated January 29, 2026.
    https://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/collaborative-combat-aircraft-cca-usa/
  20. Wikipedia. "Manned-Unmanned Teaming." Accessed June 22, 2026.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned-unmanned_teaming
  21. Calibre Defence. "The Growing Collaborative Combat Aircraft Marketplace." October 6, 2025.
    https://www.calibredefence.co.uk/the-growing-collaborative-combat-aircraft-marketplace/
  22. Army Recognition. "Türkiye Positions ANKA III Stealth Combat Drone for Production as Next-Gen Strike Asset." February 13, 2026.
    https://www.armyrecognition.com/archives/archives-defense-exhibitions/2026-archives-news-defense-exhibitions/world-defense-show-2026/
  23. Grey Dynamics. "Anka-3: Demonstrating Turkey's Growing UCAV Expertise." November 29, 2025.
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  24. TRT World. "Why Türkiye's Homegrown KAAN Fighter Could Reshape Asia's Airpower Calculus." February 26, 2026.
    https://www.trtworld.com/article/8bb2b411da56
  25. Defence Security Asia. "Türkiye's KAAN Combat Aircraft Nears 2028 Delivery, Reshaping NATO Air Superiority and Global Defence Force Posture." June 2026.
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Aviation Week & Space Technology  ·  Analytical / Staff Report  ·  June 22, 2026  ·  All rights reserved

 

 

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AFRL "Flyer" — Deep Dive:


Aerospace & Defense · Supercomputing · 22 June 2026 — Technical Follow-On
Analysis · Supply Chain · Global HPC Competition · Operations

Who Built It, What's Inside, Where It Stands Against China, and How the Machine Gets Shared

Four questions the ribbon-cutting left unanswered: the contractor and chip supply chain behind TI-23; Flyer's true rank in the global supercomputer order—including China's secret exascale machines; what 8.7 petaflops actually buys for hypersonic aerothermal simulation; and the bureaucratic and technical machinery that decides which research teams get core-hours and when.

Aerospace & Defense / HPC Technology 22 June 2026

BLUF — Bottom Line Up Front

Penguin Solutions (a subsidiary of Smart Global Holdings, formerly Penguin Computing) is the most likely integrator of the TI-23 Flyer and Raven systems, having won the $68 million DoD HPCMP contract in September 2021 for exactly two platforms at AFRL and Navy DSRCs. NVIDIA GPU accelerators are confirmed; AMD CPUs are the precedent architecture. Globally, Flyer's 8.7 petaflops places it far outside the top 100 publicly ranked machines — yet China's most capable systems (Tianhe-3 "Xingyi" at ~1.3 exaflops sustained and Sunway OceanLight at comparable scale) are deliberately withheld from TOP500 rankings, complicating direct comparison. For hypersonic CFD, Flyer's GPU-dense architecture targets turbulence-transition physics and aerothermal coupled-field problems that previously required months of wall-clock time on older AFRL clusters; individual simulation campaigns that consumed six months on predecessor hardware have been cut to three weeks. Project access is governed by a five-tier allocation hierarchy — from standard batch through Frontier multi-year dedicated-priority campaigns — scheduled via Slurm under fair-share priority rules that weight urgency, project tier, and historical utilization.

I. Who Built Flyer? The Prime Contractor and Supply Chain

AFRL has not publicly named the integrator of TI-23 at the June 2026 ribbon-cutting — a routine omission for DoD procurement, where vendor identity and system architecture below the top-level headline figures are often withheld on acquisition sensitivity grounds. However, the public record is sufficiently specific to identify the most probable prime with high confidence.

In September 2021, the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program awarded Penguin Computing — now operating as Penguin Solutions, a subsidiary of Smart Global Holdings (SGH) — two contracts collectively valued at $68 million. Those contracts called for delivery of Penguin TrueHPC supercomputing platforms, plus managed services and high-performance storage, to exactly two sites: the Air Force Research Laboratory DSRC and the Navy DSRC. The award predates the formal TI-23 program designation, but the number and location of the contracted systems precisely matches the TI-23 Flyer (AFRL, unclassified) and TI-23 Raven (AFRL, classified) pair. Penguin's own president, Sid Mair, confirmed at contract award that the platforms would be used for "the highly complex problems the user community is tasked with solving" and cited AMD and NVIDIA partnerships as the enabling semiconductor relationship.

TI-23 Probable Supply Chain — Based on Public Procurement Record

  • System Integrator (Prime)
    • Penguin Solutions
    • Subsidiary of Smart Global Holdings (SGH); formerly Penguin Computing. Winner of $68M DoD HPCMP contract (Sep 2021) for two TrueHPC platforms at AFRL and Navy DSRCs. Penguin has offered HPC solutions since 1998; acquired by SGH (Cayman Islands-based) for $85M in 2019.
  • GPU Accelerator (Confirmed)
    • NVIDIA Corporation
    • NVIDIA GPU model unspecified at ribbon-cutting. Brig. Gen. Wickert cited "NVIDIA chips and GPUs" explicitly. Penguin's TrueHPC platforms for DoD have used NVIDIA H100 or A100-class datacenter GPUs in recent configurations. Export-controlled; not available to Chinese or sanctioned entities.
  • CPU (Precedent Architecture)
    • AMD
    • Raider (TI-21, the immediately preceding AFRL system) used AMD CPUs + NVIDIA GPUs per 2022 AFRL DSRC disclosure. The TI-23 architecture is unconfirmed at the CPU level; AMD EPYC is standard in Penguin TrueHPC configurations. TI-23 may also follow the full AMD + NVIDIA GPU-accelerated pattern used in El Capitan and Frontier.
  • High-Performance Storage
    • Likely DDN or equivalent
    • 18 PB storage capacity confirmed. Previous AFRL DSRC generations (HPE SGI 8600 era) used DDN Lustre parallel storage; Penguin TrueHPC configurations typically offer DDN or IBM Spectrum Scale. Specific vendor not publicly disclosed for TI-23.
  • Interconnect Fabric
    • InfiniBand (likely) or HPE Slingshot
    • Not publicly disclosed. Raider used Penguin's integrated fabric. At 186,000 processors, a high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect (NDR InfiniBand at 400 Gbit/s per port, or HPE Slingshot) is required to prevent I/O bottlenecks in coupled-field hypersonic simulations.
  • Network Backbone (DREN)
    • Verizon
    • DREN 4, the DoD Research and Engineering Network connecting all five DSRCs, is operated under a commercial services contract awarded to Verizon in 2021. Supports 1–100 Gbit/s data transfer; IPv6-native with IPv4 compatibility. More than 210 DoD sites connected.
  • Managed Services
    • Penguin Solutions
    • Included in 2021 contract. Bryon Foster (AFRL DSRC director) confirmed 24/7/365 operational commitment; Penguin's managed services team provides system administration, user support, and continuous operation assurance for DoD HPCMP centers.

One earlier generation of AFRL DSRC systems — a set of four SGI 8600 clusters commissioned before the Raider era — was supplied by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and powered by 24-core Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel Omni-Path fabric and DDN Lustre storage at 12 petabytes per system. That HPE/Intel architecture has given way to the AMD CPU + NVIDIA GPU architecture across recent DoD HPCMP insertions, consistent with the broader industry migration toward heterogeneous compute for mixed HPC/AI workloads. Flyer's NVIDIA GPU content is the clearest signal of this architectural shift: the same class of datacenter GPU that trains large language models at scale is now the core computational substrate for aerothermal shock physics at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

II. Where Flyer Stands in the Global Supercomputer Order

Benchmarked at 8.7 petaflops, Flyer does not approach the upper tier of the current global TOP500. As of the June 2025 TOP500 list, the entry threshold (rank 500) stood at 2.57 petaflops — meaning Flyer would rank somewhere in the vicinity of the 200th to 250th position worldwide, a mid-table placement. The three leading U.S. Department of Energy machines occupy a different computational order of magnitude entirely: El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory tops the list at 1,742 petaflops (1.742 exaflops), Frontier at Oak Ridge at 1,353 petaflops, and Aurora at Argonne at 1,012 petaflops. Europe's JUPITER system at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, inaugurated in September 2025, became the continent's first exascale-class system at 1,000 petaflops.

Global Supercomputer Landscape — Selected Systems, June 2026
System Country / Operator Peak (Rmax) Architecture TOP500 Rank Primary Mission
El Capitan USA / LLNL 1,742 PFlop/s HPE Cray EX, AMD EPYC + MI300A #1 Nuclear stockpile stewardship
Frontier USA / ORNL 1,353 PFlop/s HPE Cray EX235a, AMD EPYC + MI250X #2 DOE open science
Aurora USA / Argonne NL 1,012 PFlop/s HPE Cray EX, Intel Max Series #3 AI + science
JUPITER Booster Germany / FZ Jülich ~1,000 PFlop/s NVIDIA GH200 (Grace Hopper) #4 European research
Tianhe-3 "Xingyi" China / NUDT Tianjin ~1,300–1,700 PFlop/s (est.) Phytium CPUs + Matrix-3000 (domestic) Not submitted Defense/AI — classified
Sunway OceanLight China / NSC Wuxi ~1,000+ PFlop/s (est.) Sunway Microelectronics (domestic) Not submitted Ocean modeling / defense
Sunway TaihuLight China / NSC Wuxi 93 PFlop/s Domestic SW26010 manycore #24 (Nov 2025) General research
Flyer (TI-23) USA / AFRL WPAFB 8.7 PFlop/s Penguin TrueHPC, NVIDIA GPUs, AMD CPUs (prob.) ~200–250 (est.) Defense RDT&E (unclassified)
Raven (TI-23) USA / AFRL WPAFB ~5–6 PFlop/s (est.) Penguin TrueHPC (classified config.) Not submitted Defense RDT&E (classified)
Raider (TI-21) USA / AFRL WPAFB 12 PFlop/s Penguin, AMD + NVIDIA ~50 (at commission, 2023) Defense RDT&E (predecessor)

* Flyer's TOP500 rank is an estimate; AFRL DSRC systems are not routinely submitted to the TOP500 list. Raven specifications are estimated from the combined 14 PFlop/s target minus Flyer's 8.7 PFlop/s. Chinese exascale figures reflect unverified intelligence community and open-source assessments; neither system has been formally benchmarked on HPL. Sources: TOP500.org, Data Center Dynamics, Tom's Hardware, Wikipedia, NextPlatform.

The China comparison requires careful handling. On the public TOP500 list, China's highest-ranked submission as of November 2025 is the 2016-vintage Sunway TaihuLight at 93 petaflops — ranking 24th, more than ten times slower than Flyer's own predecessor, Raider. This number is almost universally acknowledged in the HPC community as a profound underrepresentation of China's actual computational capability. Since 2017, Chinese institutions have progressively withdrawn new systems from TOP500 submissions, offering Gordon Bell Prize competition papers as the primary evidence of continued development instead.

By most credible open-source estimates, China operates at least two exascale-class systems. Tianhe-3 (nicknamed "Xingyi"), developed by the National University of Defense Technology and housed at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, has been estimated at approximately 1.3 exaflops sustained (1.7 exaflops peak) on HPL-equivalent benchmarks — performance that would place it between Frontier and El Capitan if submitted to TOP500. The Sunway OceanLight at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi is estimated at comparable throughput. A third exascale-class system, allegedly built by China's Sugon (now operating under U.S. entity-list restrictions that blocked its access to AMD Hygon CPUs) and housed at the Shenzhen supercomputing center, has an uncertain status. China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stated in mid-2024 that China's aggregate installed computing capacity across all systems had reached approximately 230 exaflops of theoretical peak — a figure that, taken at face value, represents aggregate capacity of the entire government, commercial, and research sectors, not individual machine peak performance.

"China's OceanLight system … at least seems to aspire to exaflop-sized performance — albeit one that remains inscrutable to international standards." NextPlatform, February 2024, citing HPC community analysis

The geopolitical dimension of this opacity is significant: U.S. export controls imposed since 2019 have systematically denied China access to advanced NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs — the same accelerators almost certainly powering Flyer — and have restricted Huawei and Sugon from U.S.-origin technology. China's response has been to develop indigenous alternatives, including Huawei's Ascend series and domestic interconnect fabrics, at considerable cost in both money and performance parity. The Tianhe-3 and OceanLight systems are built on entirely domestic silicon from Phytium (CPUs) and Sunway Microelectronics respectively — a deliberate supply-chain independence that trades performance efficiency for invulnerability to U.S. sanctions. From AFRL's operational standpoint, the direct performance comparison is less strategically relevant than the access-and-security envelope: Flyer operates within a classified-adjacent, export-controlled, security-vetted infrastructure that no Chinese entity can access, while Chinese defense supercomputing operates in a comparable walled garden that U.S. researchers cannot reach.

III. What 8.7 Petaflops Actually Buys for Hypersonic CFD

The engineering claim that matters most for AFRL's mission is not where Flyer ranks on TOP500 but what it enables in hypersonic research that predecessor systems could not accomplish on acceptable timescales. The physics problem is instructive.

A hypersonic vehicle traveling at Mach 5 or above generates a shock-layer environment in which the flow chemistry, heat transfer, and boundary-layer dynamics are tightly coupled across multiple physical phenomena: high-temperature gas dissociation and ionization, turbulent boundary-layer transition (which determines transition from laminar to turbulent heat flux — a factor of three to seven in heating rate), ablation and oxidation of thermal protection materials, and plasma sheath formation that attenuates radio-frequency communications. Each of these phenomena operates on different length and time scales, and their accurate coupled representation requires fine spatial resolution that scales computational cost as roughly the cube of the linear resolution factor. Halving the grid spacing in all three dimensions multiplies computational cost by approximately eight. Running to higher Mach numbers, longer bodies, or more complex geometries compounds this further.

AFRL's own documentation for its predecessor Raider system (TI-21) illustrated the practical consequence: a Navy simulation project that previously required six months of continuous compute time on the available DSRC hardware was cut to three weeks on Raider's 12-petaflop architecture — a factor of roughly eight in elapsed time. The Flyer-Raven TI-23 combination offers approximately 1.17 times Raider's total performance in direct petaflop terms (14 combined versus 12), but GPU-accelerated HPC does not scale linearly with headline petaflop count for all workload types. The key enabler is the NVIDIA GPU's performance on the specific linear algebra kernels that dominate CFD solvers: sparse matrix-vector products, fast Fourier transforms for spectral methods, and the iterative linear solvers (GMRES, multigrid) that consume most clock cycles in Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES) codes.

AFRL's computational aeroscience community uses several DoD HPCMP-maintained and community-developed codes for hypersonic work: Kestrel (the HPCMP CREATE Air Vehicles code), OVERFLOW (NASA/AFRL), and US3D (University of Minnesota, developed under AFRL-funded research). These codes have been progressively GPU-ported over the past five years, and all three benefit directly from Flyer's NVIDIA GPU density. Purdue University's AFRL-sponsored hypersonic turbulence research — which uses HPCMP computing allocations to design passive surface treatments for boundary-layer transition delay — provides a concrete example: computational simulation campaigns design the surface geometry, physical tunnel tests at AFRL's Mach 6 Ludwieg tube validate the results, and the agreement between prediction and experiment determines whether the next simulation campaign is warranted. The HPCMP Frontier ceramics program extended this paradigm to materials discovery, predicting approximately 900 candidate thermal protection compounds — a screening campaign that would have been physically infeasible through bench synthesis.

At 8.7 petaflops with GPU acceleration, Flyer enables LES campaigns on full-vehicle hypersonic geometries that were previously limited to reduced-geometry or 2D-symmetric configurations on RANS solvers at lower fidelity. The practical implication: aerothermal predictions at the nose cap, control surface junction, and inlet throat of a hypersonic glide vehicle can now be run in high-fidelity LES in days rather than months, enabling design-space exploration that was previously incompatible with acquisition program timelines.

IV. Operations: How Projects Are Scheduled and Prioritized

An Engineers Guide to Scheduling a CFD job on Flyer. Flyer does not operate as a dedicated single-purpose machine for any one research program. Like all HPCMP DSRC systems, it is a shared national resource serving hundreds of concurrent projects across the services, agencies, and sponsored civilian and contractor researchers. The allocation and scheduling architecture that governs who gets core-hours, when, and at what priority is a two-layer system: a resource allocation governance layer that determines how many core-hours each project receives per fiscal year, and a job scheduling layer that determines when allocated compute jobs actually run.

At the governance layer, the HPCMP's Resource Management team collects and manages computational requirements through the Portal to the Information Environment (pIE), coordinated with Service/Agency Approval Authorities (S/AAA) — the branch-level gatekeepers who validate that a proposed project aligns with DoD mission priorities and that the requesting organization has appropriate clearances and DoD sponsorship. All users must have a DoD government scientist or engineer as a sponsor; principal investigators may be from government, industry, or academia. The S/AAA approval is required before any core-hour allocation is granted.

Projects are allocated resources in five general tiers, each with distinct proposal requirements, priority treatment in the scheduler, and compute quantum available:

● URGENT
Urgent Projects
DoD HPCMP-designated. Bypass normal queue ordering; immediate resource claim. Reserved for time-critical operational or acquisition crises where delay constitutes unacceptable mission risk. Requires HPCMP Director-level approval.
● HIGH PRIORITY
High Priority Projects
Pre-authorized elevated queue access. Jobs in the "high" Slurm queue jump ahead of standard allocations. Typically reserved for acquisition program milestones, test and evaluation support, or Congressional-directed priorities.
● FRONTIER
Frontier Projects
Multi-year commitments of exceptional compute allocations — resources that would not be achievable through standard channels. Competitive proposal process, reviewed by the High Performance Computing Advisory Panel (HPCAP). Eligible PIs include government, industry, and academia with DoD sponsor. Dedicated Slurm queue partition.
● AE PROGRAM
Acquisition Engineering
Dedicated track for acquisition engineering, mission engineering, and T&E workflows tied to DoD programs of record. Access to compute resources, DREN network access, and specialized modeling/simulation software tools (CREATE suite). Managed separately from S&T allocations.
● STANDARD
Standard Allocations
The baseline tier. Annual core-hour allocations via S/AAA approval. Jobs submitted to standard, large, background, or debug Slurm partitions with fair-share scheduling. Background queue allows low-priority opportunistic jobs (up to 10 concurrent per user); debug queue is limited to short verification runs.

At the job scheduling layer, Flyer (and Raider before it) uses the Slurm Workload Manager — the same scheduler that powers more than 60 percent of TOP500 systems globally, including the Tianhe-2 in China. Slurm manages the assignment of specific compute nodes to queued jobs based on resource availability, time limits, and priority scores. Priority is computed from a combination of factors: project allocation tier (Urgent/High/Frontier jobs receive favorable treatment), fair-share weighting (teams that have recently consumed large fractions of their allocation receive lower instantaneous priority to equalize system access over time), job size and wall-clock time limits, and queue-specific policies set by AFRL DSRC system administrators.

The HPCMP additionally offers Dedicated Support Partitions (DSPs) — reserved node sets held for specific programs that require guaranteed turnaround, analogous to a dedicated laboratory instrument that cannot be preempted by other users. DSPs are a premium resource available only to programs that have justified the need for guaranteed access windows, such as large-scale time-sensitive test support campaigns where computational results must be available before a physical test event proceeds.

For Frontier-class projects — the largest and most computationally demanding campaigns — the proposal process is formally competitive. Proposals are reviewed by the High Performance Computing Advisory Panel (HPCAP), a board of senior DoD computational science and engineering experts, and must demonstrate both scientific or engineering rigor and a clear connection to DoD acquisition or S&T mission outcomes. Multi-year commitments are evaluated at annual Intermediate Program Reviews (IPRs), and continued funding is contingent on demonstrated progress. The HPCMP Institute program, a parallel track, funds software development efforts that produce deployable tools for the wider HPCMP user community — CREATE-class codes and similar deliverables — and imposes the same IPR discipline with weekly activity reports and monthly financial reporting.

"Sometimes even before the system is running, we're ordering the next one. These systems are so large, and it takes so much to build them, get them in the building and up and running that there is a continual process." Bryon Foster, Director, AFRL DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (2023, discussing the TI-23 procurement)

The operational rhythm that results is one of perpetual queuing under a priority framework that mirrors the broader DoD funding hierarchy: programs of record with acquisition milestones get AE or High queue access; large multi-year S&T campaigns compete for Frontier status; smaller research efforts and academic partners operate in the standard tier under fair-share rules that prevent any single group from monopolizing the system. The 24/7/365 operational commitment means Flyer's 186,000 processors are never intentionally idle — unused cycles are consumed by lower-priority background queue jobs rather than allowed to go to waste. Over a projected five-year service life, this continuous-utilization model underpins the $800 million lifetime savings figure: every hour of simulation delivered is an hour of physical testing avoided.

V. The Supply Chain Vulnerability Underneath Flyer's Capability

A final dimension of Flyer's significance that received no attention at the ribbon-cutting but is implicit in its architecture: the entire system depends on NVIDIA GPU silicon that is manufactured, at leading edge, at TSMC in Taiwan — and is now subject to the same export control architecture that restricts Chinese access to that same silicon. The U.S. maintains its lead in deployable GPU-accelerated supercomputing precisely because NVIDIA H100 and successor chips cannot be legally exported to China, and because China's domestic accelerator industry (Huawei Ascend, Biren, Cambricon) has not yet closed the performance gap at scale. AFRL's Flyer is therefore simultaneously a national defense capability and a proof point in an ongoing industrial policy contest: the U.S. bet that maintaining NVIDIA export restrictions and investing in domestic GPU-dense HPC infrastructure compounds American advantage in simulation-based weapons development faster than China can build comparable capability from domestically produced silicon.

Whether that bet holds depends on China's pace of domestic semiconductor development — a question that has as much bearing on AFRL's next supercomputer procurement as any doctrinal priority or budget line. From Wright-Patterson's secure facility on Area B, Flyer's NVIDIA GPU nodes run a race that began not in Dayton but in the foundry halls of Hsinchu and the national supercomputing centers of Tianjin and Wuxi.

Verified Sources & Citations

  1. "Penguin Computing Awarded $68M to Provide HPC Capabilities to DoD." HPCwire, 14 September 2021.
    https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/penguin-computing-awarded-68m-to-provide-hpc-capabilities-to-dod/
  2. "DoD Awards $68M Contract to Penguin Computing for Two Supercomputers." Data Center Dynamics, 15 September 2021.
    https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/dod-awards-68m-contract-to-penguin-computing-for-two-supercomputers/
  3. "Air Force Research Lab Adds 12PFLOPS HPC System." Inside HPC & AI News, 25 September 2023.
    https://insidehpc.com/2023/09/air-force-research-lab-adds-12pflops-penguin-hpc-system/
  4. "HPE to Deliver Seven Supercomputers to Department of Defense." TOP500.org.
    https://www.top500.org/news/hpe-to-deliver-seven-supercomputers-to-department-of-defense/
  5. "TOP500 List — June 2025." TOP500.org, June 2025.
    https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2025/06/
  6. "TOP500." Wikipedia, updated May 2026. (Aggregate country performance figures; El Capitan, Frontier, Aurora rankings.)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
  7. Balci, Mete. "State of Supercomputers Around the World in 2026." metebalci.com, May 2026. (Four exascale systems; JUPITER; Chinese non-submissions.)
    https://metebalci.com/blog/state-of-supercomputers-around-the-world-in-2026/
  8. Sanchez, Christopher. "State of Global AI Compute (2025 Edition)." sanchez.vc GeoCoded Special Report, August 2025. (US 6.696 EFlop/s aggregate; Chinese capacity claims; Epoch AI/Georgetown data.)
    https://www.sanchez.vc/geocoded-special-reports/state-of-global-ai-compute-2025-edition
  9. "China Publishes List of Its Most Powerful Supercomputers, with No Exascale Systems to Be Found." Data Center Dynamics, May 2026. (487.94 PFlop/s top Chinese public system; 63 TOP500 submissions.)
    https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/china-publishes-list-of-its-most-powerful-supercomputers-with-no-exascale-systems-to-be-found/
  10. Hruska, Joel. "China May Have Unmatched Supercomputer Abilities, Third Exascale Machine Apparently Online." Tom's Hardware, September 2023. (OceanLight, Tianhe-3 "Xingyi," Sugon/Shenzhen status.)
    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/industry-expert-chinas-supercomputer-might-may-be-unmatched
  11. "Two Chinese Supercomputers Break Exascale Barrier." Tom's Hardware, October 2021. (Tianhe-3/Phytium + Matrix-3000; OceanLight/Sunway Microelectronics architecture.)
    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/two-chinese-exascale-supercomputers
  12. "The Mystery of Tianhe-3, The World's Fastest Supercomputer, Solved?" NextPlatform, February 2024. (Architectural analysis of Xingyi; comparison to El Capitan.)
    https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/02/09/the-mystery-of-tianhe-3-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-solved/
  13. "More Details Slip Out About China's Two Secret Exascale Supercomputers." Data Center Dynamics, November 2021. (Tianhe-3: 1.3 exaflops HPL sustained, 1.7 peak.)
    https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/more-details-slip-out-about-chinas-two-secret-exascale-supercomputers-third-may-be-delayed/
  14. "Supercomputing in China." Wikipedia, updated June 2026. (Exascale systems; TOP500 withdrawal; domestic silicon.)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputing_in_China
  15. "Exascale Computing." Wikipedia, updated June 2026. (Tianhe-3 and OceanLight operational as of 2023; JUPITER 2025.)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exascale_computing
  16. Choi, Charles Q. "Top500: Frontier Still No. 1. Where's China?" IEEE Spectrum. (OceanLight citation; Chinese HPC opacity analysis.)
    https://spectrum.ieee.org/frontier-exascale-top500-export-controls
  17. DoD HPCMP Resource Management. "Resource Management — Allocation Processes." hpc.mil. (pIE portal; S/AAA approval; Frontier and DSP programs.)
    https://www.hpc.mil/solution-areas/resource-management
  18. DoD HPCMP. "Call for FY 2025 DoD Frontier Project Proposals." hpc.mil. (Frontier eligibility, purpose, multi-year commitment structure.)
    https://www.hpc.mil/calls/call-for-fy-2025-dod-frontier-project-proposals
  19. DoD HPCMP. "Call for DoD HPCMP Acquisition Engineering Project Requests." hpc.mil. (AE program structure, lifecycle phase coverage.)
    https://hpc.mil/calls/call-for-dod-hpcmp-acquisition-engineering-project-requests
  20. "Raider Slurm Guide." centers.hpc.mil / AFRL DSRC, updated April 2026. (Slurm queues: urgent, high, frontier, standard, large, background, debug; queue limits and priority rules.)
    https://centers.hpc.mil/users/docs/afrl/raiderSlurmGuide.html
  21. AFRL Regional Network / Air Force Tech Connect. "Supercomputer Allocation Enables Purdue Hypersonic Research." Air Force Tech Connect, February 2024. (Mach 6 Ludwieg tube; turbulence transition; HPCMP allocation enabling validation experiments.)
    https://airforcetechconnect.org/news/supercomputer-allocation-enables-purdue-hypersonic-research
  22. DoD HPCMP. "Call for FY23 DoD HPCMP Institute Proposals." hpc.mil. (Institute structure; weekly/monthly/annual reporting; IPR milestones; software deliverable requirements.)
    https://www.hpc.mil/calls/call-for-fy23-dod-hpcmp-institute-proposals

Prepared in the style of IEEE Spectrum as a technical follow-on companion to the 22 June 2026 AFRL Flyer commissioning report. Penguin Solutions prime contractor identification is based on the 2021 public contract record and is inferred, not confirmed, for TI-23. Chinese exascale performance figures are open-source assessments; neither Tianhe-3 nor OceanLight has been publicly benchmarked on standard HPL metrics. All Slurm queue parameters reflect the documented Raider (TI-21) configuration at centers.hpc.mil and are presumed to be substantially replicated on Flyer (TI-23), but Flyer-specific queue documentation had not been published as of this writing.

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AFRL's "Flyer" Supercomputer:


Aerospace & Defense · Supercomputing · 22 June 2026
High-Performance Computing · Military Technology

8.7 Petaflops Bring Hypersonics, AI, and Next-Generation Aircraft Design into a New Computational Era

The Air Force Research Laboratory has commissioned a $20 million, NVIDIA GPU-powered machine at Wright-Patterson AFB that its builders say collapses five centuries of laptop-equivalent computation into a single day—marking the latest step in the DoD's rolling modernization of defense high-performance computing.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio 22 June 2026

BLUF — Bottom Line Up Front

On 18 June 2026, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) commissioned "Flyer," a $20 million supercomputer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Designated TI-23, the system delivers 8.7 petaflops of computational throughput through 186,000 processors and 800 terabytes of RAM, supported by 18 petabytes of storage and powered by NVIDIA GPUs. It is projected to operate continuously for five years and to save the Department of Defense more than $800 million in testing and acquisition costs over its service life. Together with its companion classified system "Raven," already operational, the two machines are projected to provide a combined 14 petaflops for the Air Force's DoD Supercomputing Resource Center—the largest such center in the Air Force. Target applications include hypersonic vehicle aerothermal modeling, AI/machine learning workload acceleration, and digital-engineering simulations of next-generation aircraft systems.

On the 18th of June 2026, Air Force Research Laboratory officials gathered in a secure building on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base's Area B for a ribbon-cutting ceremony that, in their telling, echoed a ceremony performed 122 years earlier a few miles away. That earlier moment involved Orville and Wilbur Wright and a canvas-and-spruce glider. This one involved rack upon rack of NVIDIA-accelerated processing nodes, a machine they named in deliberate homage to the Wrights' Flyer of 1903—and which they say can accomplish in 24 hours what would require approximately 500 years of continuous computation on a modern consumer laptop.

The new system, officially designated TI-23 and christened "Flyer," represents AFRL's latest technology insertion under the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (DoD HPCMP), a congressionally directed program in continuous operation since 1992. The $20 million machine joins nine other supercomputers already resident at Wright-Patterson, which hosts the largest Air Force DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) of the program's five centers nationwide.

System Architecture and Throughput

AFRL officials have disclosed the top-level configuration of Flyer: 186,000 processing cores, 800 terabytes of random-access memory, and 18 petabytes of storage capacity, all accelerated by NVIDIA graphics processing units whose specific model designations were not publicly disclosed at the ribbon-cutting. Benchmarked peak throughput is reported at 8.7 petaflops—that is, 8.7 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. To contextualize that number: if every human being on Earth performed one arithmetic operation every second without pause, it would take the planet's entire population roughly four years to equal what Flyer computes in a single second.

Flyer's 800-terabyte RAM pool is equivalent, by AFRL's own metric, to the working memory required to outfit two million conventional laptops simultaneously. Storage capacity is expressed by the laboratory in more cinematic terms: 3.6 billion photographs, or 46 years of high-definition video. The system will operate continuously—24 hours a day, 365 days a year—for at least five years. Bryon Foster, director of AFRL's DoD Supercomputing Resource Center, has projected that the $20 million capital cost will yield more than $800 million in savings to the Department over Flyer's operational lifetime, chiefly by displacing expensive physical testing with validated high-fidelity simulation.

"All of this will be dedicated to solving problems—difficult problems—for the Department of War." Bryon Foster, Director, AFRL DoD Supercomputing Resource Center, 18 June 2026

Flyer operates as an unclassified resource. Its companion system, "Raven"—also designated TI-23—handles classified workloads and was commissioned ahead of Flyer's public rollout; an AFRL spokeswoman confirmed Raven has been operational for some time. Together, the two TI-23 machines are projected to deliver a combined 14 petaflops of computational capability, supporting both open and controlled research environments within AFRL's mission space.

The DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program Context

Flyer is not an isolated procurement but the latest increment in a deliberately rolling modernization strategy that AFRL has operated for more than three decades. The DoD HPCMP, managed through the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology, maintains five DSRCs—at Wright-Patterson (Air Force), Aberdeen Proving Ground (Army Research Laboratory), Stennis Space Center (Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command), Vicksburg, Miss. (Army Engineer Research and Development Center), and Maui, Hawaii (Maui High Performance Computing Center). The centers share computational resources across the Air Force, Army, Navy, and affiliated DoD organizations, including sponsored contractors, civilian researchers, and academic partners.

Kelly Dalton, director of the DoD High Performance Computing Program, described the procurement philosophy at the ribbon-cutting: the center operates on a continuous insertion cycle in which each system's procurement often overlaps with the commissioning of its predecessor. "Sometimes even before the system is running, we're ordering the next one," Foster had noted in an earlier interview, characterizing a planning cadence driven by the scale and lead time of large HPC procurements. Dalton drew a direct line from the Wright Brothers to the current investment, noting that Orville and Wilbur built a six-foot wind tunnel in their west Dayton bicycle shop to systematize aerodynamic experimentation—an early form of computational substitution for costly trial-and-error. "The brothers then conducted systematic, rigorous laboratory experiments on hundreds of airfoils, translating raw empirical data into precise mathematical equations," Dalton said. "They computed lift, drag, and thrust."

Predecessor Systems and the AFRL HPC Lineage

AFRL's supercomputing lineage at Wright-Patterson follows a naming tradition drawn from aviation history. Flyer's immediate predecessor in the unclassified tier was Raider—designated TI-21 in honor of the Doolittle Raiders of World War II—commissioned in September 2023. Raider, built by Penguin Systems and powered by AMD CPUs paired with NVIDIA GPUs, delivered approximately 12 petaflops and briefly ranked in the vicinity of the fiftieth most powerful system on the TOP500 list. Its own predecessor, Thunder, installed in 2015, produced 3.1 petaflops—less than one thirty-sixth of the performance projected from the combined Flyer-Raven TI-23 pairing.

  • 2015 Thunder commissioned — 3.1 petaflops; AMD/NVIDIA hardware.
  •  2019 AFRL unveils first-ever shared classified DoD HPC capability at WPAFB, comprising Mustang (unclassified), Voodoo, Shadow, and Spectre (classified tiers).
  •  2023 Sep Raider (TI-21) commissioned — ~12 petaflops; Penguin Systems, AMD CPUs + NVIDIA GPUs; accelerated a Navy simulation project from six months to three weeks.
  •  2023 Q4 AFRL orders TI-23 Flyer and TI-23 Raven, targeting combined 14 petaflops; Raven (classified) begins installation and testing.
  •  2026 Jun Flyer (TI-23, unclassified) commissioned at WPAFB Area B ribbon-cutting ceremony — 8.7 petaflops, 186,000 processors, 800 TB RAM, 18 PB storage, NVIDIA GPUs; Raven already operational.

The acceleration trajectory is instructive from a systems-engineering standpoint: AFRL has achieved roughly a 4.5-fold improvement in peak throughput from Raider to Flyer across a three-year cycle, consistent with the broader industry trend of GPU-accelerated supercomputing scaling faster than Moore's Law predictions for CPU-only clusters. The shift from CPU-dominant to GPU-dominant architectures, already evident in Raider's design and now fully realized in Flyer's NVIDIA-centric configuration, reflects the same architectural pivot that has driven commercial AI infrastructure investment at hyperscaler scale.

Mission Applications: Hypersonics, AI, and Digital Engineering

The primary mission drivers for Flyer span three intersecting domains of current Air Force priority: hypersonic weapons development, artificial intelligence and machine learning infrastructure, and next-generation aircraft digital engineering. Each represents a category of computational workload that exceeds the practical capacity of earlier AFRL systems and, in some cases, cannot be meaningfully addressed through physical testing at all.

Hypersonic vehicle modeling is particularly demanding. Aircraft traveling at speeds exceeding Mach 5 generate aerothermal environments—shock-induced heating, plasma sheath formation, turbulent boundary layer transitions—whose physics are nonlinear and tightly coupled across fluid dynamics, thermochemistry, and material response timescales. Ground-based testing in hypersonic wind tunnels, such as AFRL's own Mach 6 Ludwieg tube facility at Dayton, provides short-duration burst data on the order of 100 milliseconds per run, severely limiting the scope of design parameter exploration. Computational fluid dynamics codes running on HPC resources extend that exploration space by orders of magnitude. AFRL has previously noted that hypersonic vehicles "travel too fast to test on a range"—a constraint that elevates computational simulation from a supplementary tool to the primary design environment for critical performance envelope regions. The HPCMP's Frontier program has separately funded computational ceramics research aimed at identifying thermal protection materials capable of surviving hypersonic aerothermal loads, predicting approximately 900 candidate compounds in a single computational campaign that would have been impractical through laboratory synthesis alone.

AI and machine learning workloads represent the second major demand driver. AFRL's Digital Capabilities Directorate has articulated compute capacity as the foundational substrate of the laboratory's digital transformation strategy. Brig. Gen. Douglas "Beaker" Wickert, AFRL's commanding general, spoke in those terms at the commissioning ceremony: "The 21st century is the century of data. It's the century of information, and the capabilities—the NVIDIA chips and the GPUs that Flyer is going to bring—are going to allow us to invent the future." Large-scale AI training runs and inference workloads for autonomous systems, sensor fusion, electronic warfare signal processing, and logistics optimization all benefit directly from GPU-dense HPC configurations, and AFRL researchers have access to Flyer's resources through the same allocation mechanisms used by the broader DoD community.

"The Wright brothers did not just build an airplane. They calculated their way into the sky." Kelly Dalton, Director, DoD High Performance Computing Program, 18 June 2026

Digital engineering for next-generation aircraft—the third pillar of Flyer's stated mission—encompasses high-fidelity aerodynamic simulation, structural analysis, propulsion integration modeling, and electromagnetic compatibility prediction across platform concepts that may never be physically prototyped at intermediate design stages. The DoD HPCMP's CREATE software suite, developed specifically for defense acquisition CFD and computational electromagnetics, runs on AFRL's DSRCs. Historically, the same modeling and simulation paradigm accelerated a Navy project from six months to three weeks on the Raider platform; AFRL officials project proportional or greater gains on Flyer's 8.7-petaflop architecture.

Cost-Benefit Architecture: Simulation as Test-Cost Offset

The $800 million lifetime savings figure cited by program director Dalton warrants engineering-level scrutiny. The HPCMP's value argument rests on a well-established cost-offset model: replacing physical hardware-in-the-loop testing, range instrumentation, and experimental hardware fabrication with validated simulation reduces total acquisition cost and accelerates program schedules. The model has documented precedents. At the system level, computational design exploration compresses the design space before hardware commitment, reducing expensive late-cycle engineering changes. At the material level, as illustrated by the HPCMP Frontier ceramics program, HPC allows prediction and down-selection among thousands of candidate compounds, reserving physical synthesis for a much smaller validated set.

The 40-to-1 savings ratio implied by $20 million in capital cost against $800 million in projected savings is aggressive but not unprecedented in DoD HPC program documentation. It reflects the cumulative value of simulation hours provided across multiple programs and multiple services over a five-year service life, rather than a single-program test-replacement calculation. Independent verification of that figure is not available in public sources; it is an AFRL/HPCMP program estimate presented at the commissioning event.

Infrastructure, Access, and Security Architecture

Flyer occupies a secure facility on Wright-Patterson's Area B and operates within the Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN), the DoD's dedicated high-speed wide-area network connecting the five DSRCs and more than 210 DoD sites including research laboratories, test centers, universities, and industrial facilities. DREN's fourth-generation infrastructure, provisioned under a commercial services contract awarded to Verizon in 2021, delivers data transfer rates from 1 Gbit/s to 100 Gbit/s and operates as an IPv6 network with legacy IPv4 support.

Access to Flyer is not restricted to uniformed Air Force personnel. As with the other AFRL DSRC systems, the resource is available to DoD-sponsored contractors, civilian researchers, military users from all services, and academic investigators operating under a valid DoD sponsor relationship. The HPCMP manages allocation through a competitive proposal review process, with dedicated allocation tracks including the Frontier Project program for large-scale computationally intensive research. The complementary Raven system handles classified workloads under the same HPCMP umbrella but with access governed by cleared-facility and need-to-know restrictions appropriate to its classification tier.

In May 2025, the HPCMP further expanded its compute ecosystem by authorizing InfiniteTactics' Analytics Gateway platform—known as AWS-Gate—to operate as a hybrid HPC-as-a-service layer bridging DSRC on-premises resources and AWS GovCloud capacity. That authority-to-operate approval formally extended HPCMP-managed resources into commercial cloud infrastructure for the first time, allowing burst capacity for AI/ML workloads that periodically exceed on-premises queue bandwidth. Flyer operates within this hybrid ecosystem as the on-premises anchor of unclassified compute, with AWS-Gate providing elastic overflow.

Congressional Context and the Department of War Rebranding

Representative Mike Turner (R-Dayton), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, attended the ribbon-cutting and framed the investment in explicitly competitive terms: "This is the next level of what's going to occur right here for the men and women who serve in the Air Force and what they'll be doing here for the Air Force Research Laboratories." Turner's district has a direct institutional stake in AFRL's continued presence and investment: Wright-Patterson AFB is one of the largest employers in the Dayton metropolitan area, and AFRL's DoD DSRC anchors a regional defense technology ecosystem spanning Tier 1 and Tier 2 defense contractors, academic research partners, and small-business technology developers.

Several officials at the ceremony made use of the newly redesignated "Department of War" styling—a rebranding of the Department of Defense that has appeared in budget and organizational documentation in the current administration. Foster stated directly that Flyer's resources "will be dedicated to solving problems, difficult problems, for the Department of War." Dalton invoked the same designation in projecting Flyer's operational schedule. The nomenclature shift carries no programmatic consequence for HPCMP operations, which remain governed by the same statutory framework under the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology.

Significance in the Global HPC Landscape

At 8.7 petaflops, Flyer is a capable but not record-setting system by the standards of the global TOP500 supercomputer list; its immediate AFRL predecessor, Raider, ranked approximately fiftieth on the TOP500 at commissioning in 2023. The world's most powerful system, Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, operates at roughly 1,200 petaflops (1.2 exaflops). Flyer's strategic value lies not in raw top-list ranking but in its security-enveloped availability for defense-specific workloads that cannot be run on commercially accessible systems, its connection to DREN's low-latency classified-adjacent network infrastructure, and its integration with DoD-specific computational software frameworks—including the HPCMP CREATE suite for aerodynamic and electromagnetic simulation—that are maintained and optimized specifically for defense acquisition engineering.

The HPCMP's broader pivot toward AI and machine learning—formalized in a 2024 User Group Meeting and dedicated AI/ML workshop at the Doolittle Institute in Niceville, Florida—positions Flyer as part of a deliberate infrastructure build intended to support autonomous systems research, advanced signal processing, and decision-support AI across the services. That strategic alignment with the National Defense Strategy's AI/ML priority areas gives the Flyer commissioning significance beyond the raw petaflop count, as GPU-dense HPC infrastructure is the enabling substrate for large-scale model training and high-fidelity simulation-based reinforcement learning for autonomous vehicle and weapon system development.

Looking Forward

AFRL's documented procurement cycle—in which a successor system's acquisition often begins before its predecessor achieves full operational capability—suggests that planning for TI-25 or equivalent next-generation systems is likely already underway, consistent with Foster's earlier observation that the lead time for large HPC acquisitions demands overlapping procurement horizons. The trajectory from Thunder's 3.1 petaflops in 2015 to the combined 14-petaflop TI-23 pair in 2026 represents an approximately 4.5-fold improvement per generation over three generations—a cadence that, if sustained, would place AFRL's next DSRC system in the exaflop-class range by the early 2030s, coincident with the projected initial operational capability windows for several next-generation Air Force platform programs including the Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems.

Whether that projection holds will depend on GPU architecture roadmaps, DoD budget trajectories, and the degree to which hybrid cloud integration via HPCMP's AWS-Gate architecture alleviates pressure on discrete hardware insertions. For now, Flyer represents the latest proof point in a continuous computational arms race that the Air Force Research Laboratory has been running—largely out of public view—since the Wright Brothers first made the Miami Valley a proving ground for powered flight.

Verified Sources & Citations

  1. Gnau, Thomas. "AFRL Computing Power Soars at Wright-Patterson with $20M 'Flyer' Supercomputer." Dayton Daily News, 18 June 2026.
    https://www.daytondailynews.com/local/business/afrl-computing-power-soars-at-wright-patterson-with-20m-flyer-supercomputer/article_c06159f3-0856-5719-8080-aadfadd5cbaf.html
  2. Gnau, Thomas. "AFRL Computing Power Soars at Wright-Patt with $20M 'Flyer' Supercomputer." Springfield News-Sun, 21 June 2026.
    https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/local/afrl-computing-power-soars-at-wright-patt-with-20m-flyer-supercomputer/article_27b88078-c94c-5f3d-bf2e-82886067df0c.html
  3. WKEF/Dayton 24Now. "New Supercomputer at Wright-Patterson AFB Hits 8.7 Quadrillion Calculations per Second." Dayton 24/7 Now, 19 June 2026.
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  4. Bridgeman, Kylie. "Air Force Unveils New $20M Supercomputer, Taking Tech to Next Level." WHIO-TV News Center 7, 18 June 2026.
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  5. Air Force Research Laboratory Public Affairs. "AFRL's Newest Supercomputer 'Raider' Promises to Compute Years' Worth of Data in Days, Saving Time, Money." AFRL.af.mil, 20 September 2023.
    https://www.afrl.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3521947/afrls-newest-supercomputer-raider-promises-to-compute-years-worth-of-data-in-da/
  6. Feldman, Michael. "Air Force Research Lab Adds 12PFLOPS Penguin HPC System." Inside HPC & AI News, 25 September 2023.
    https://insidehpc.com/2023/09/air-force-research-lab-adds-12pflops-penguin-hpc-system/
  7. "Air Force Research Lab Unveils Newest Supercomputer, 'Raider,' with 12 PetaFLOPS Capacity." HPCwire, 20 September 2023.
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  8. Garner, Kerry. "US Air Force Research Laboratory Gets 12 Petaflops Supercomputer." Data Center Dynamics, 18 September 2023.
    https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/us-air-force-research-laboratory-gets-new-12-petaflops-supercomputer/
  9. "New U.S. Air Force Supercomputer Can Compute Years' Worth of Data in Days." Defense Mirror, 16 September 2023.
    https://defensemirror.com/news/35016/New_U_S__Air_Force_Supercomputer_Can_Compute_Years____Worth_of_Data_in_Days
  10. Air Force Research Laboratory Public Affairs. "AFRL Introduces New Sharable Supercomputing Capability for Classified Research." Wright-Patterson AFB News, 5 March 2019.
    https://www.wpafb.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1774556/afrl-introduces-new-sharable-supercomputing-capability-for-classified-research/
  11. Corrigan, Jack. "DOD Gets First Shared Supercomputers for Classified Research." FedScoop, 8 March 2019.
    https://fedscoop.com/supercomputer-dod-shared-wright-patterson/
  12. DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program. "About DoD HPCMP." ORISE/ORAU program portal.
    https://orise.orau.gov/hpcmp/about-dod-hpcmp.html
  13. "High Performance Computing Modernization Program." Wikipedia, updated May 2026.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Modernization_Program
  14. "ATO Approved: InfiniteTactics Extends DoD's HPC Modernization Program to the Cloud." Inside HPC & AI News, 6 May 2025.
    https://insidehpc.com/2025/05/ato-approved-infinitetactics-extends-dods-hpc-modernization-program-to-the-cloud/
  15. AFRL Regional Network / Air Force Tech Connect. "Supercomputer Allocation Enables Purdue Hypersonic Research." Air Force Tech Connect, 13 February 2024.
    https://airforcetechconnect.org/news/supercomputer-allocation-enables-purdue-hypersonic-research
  16. DoD HPCMP. "Engaging the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP)." Birds-of-a-Feather session, SC19 Supercomputing Conference, 2019.
    https://sc19.supercomputing.org/proceedings/bof/bof_pages/bof145.html
  17. DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program. Official program portal. hpc.mil.
    https://www.hpc.mil/

Prepared in the style of IEEE Spectrum for informational and editorial purposes. All technical specifications and quotations are drawn from the verified primary and secondary sources listed above. Cost projections and savings figures reflect AFRL/HPCMP program estimates as stated at the 18 June 2026 ribbon-cutting ceremony and have not been independently audited.

 

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