Powering the Next Phase of Collaborative Combat Aircraft: A conversation with Kaare Erickson, Rolls-Royce | Rolls-Royce

We see CCA as one of the most strategically important aviation programs of the next decade for the US and our allied partners. There’s a lot of activity in Increment 1, but the real inflection point for propulsion is Increment 2, where the Air Force is deciding how much capability, range, survivability, and mission flexibility these platforms truly need.

From our perspective, this isn’t just about building an engine. It’s about enabling operational capability in contested environments like the Indo-Pacific, where range, electrical power, embedded installations, and payload all matter. When you start stacking those requirements together, propulsion becomes a primary driver of mission success.

That’s why Rolls-Royce is uniquely positioned. We bring proven autonomous platform experience today, advanced technology solutions, plus a future engine family purpose-built for scalable autonomous systems. We don’t need to guess. We’re already powering uncrewed aircraft across multiple missions and services, and we’re applying that experience directly to what Increment 2 will demand.

Increment 1 was about getting aircraft flying quickly. Speed mattered more than optimization. That makes sense early in a program.

Increment 2 is different. The Air Force is asking harder questions: Do we want more range? More payload, power? Better survivability? Lower operating cost? Or some balance across all of them? There’s also a third path that doesn’t get talked about enough — what I call “Increment 1+,” where you build on what exists instead of starting from scratch.

For propulsion companies, that creates a very real trade space. Do you wait years for perfectly defined requirements and then launch a clean-sheet engine? Or do you deliver mature capability now and grow it over time? We strongly believe the fastest way to deliver capability to the warfighter is to leverage proven engines today while advancing next-generation architectures in parallel and injecting the technologies to add capability only as necessary.

If you look at the Pacific operating environment, range becomes fundamental, but range drives a cascade of other requirements. Longer range means higher efficiency. Embedded installations for survivability impact airflow and thrust. Advanced sensors, autonomy processors, and mission systems demand electrical power and thermal management.

Smaller engines with very small cores simply struggle to generate enough electrical power without performance penalties or stability risks. That becomes a real limiter as missions become more complex. Slightly larger cores give you much more flexibility to generate power while maintaining engine stability and efficiency.

In other words, propulsion is what determines whether a platform can actually execute the mission, not just take off and fly. We believe there’s an overlap point where you can deliver meaningful capability without driving unaffordable complexity, and that’s exactly where our portfolio sits.

The AE 3007 is already doing the kinds of missions CCA will demand.

It powers the RQ-4 Global Hawk at altitudes above 60,000 feet for extremely long endurance missions. It powers the MQ-25 Stingray, a highly embedded, carrier-based autonomous aircraft that demands tight integration, robustness, and reliability in harsh operating environments. And it’s certified to fly at nearly Mach 0.935 in commercial service.

That combination of speed, endurance, embedded installation experience, and electrical power capability is not theoretical. It’s operational today.

The engine also benefits from decades of fleet experience across the AE engine family, with more than 90 million flight hours across both military and commercial operations. That means known reliability, mature sustainment, predictable cost, and a resilient domestic supply chain with production in Indianapolis on a single optimized assembly line.

For customers who need credible capability quickly, AE 3007 significantly reduces technical and program risk while accelerating fielding timelines. It’s not promised later. It’s available now.

Interestingly, our Orpheus team didn’t set out to develop a new product but rather was setup specifically to break the traditional engine development model, but through this process they developed a unique new engine architecture that delivers significant capability for future autonomous platforms.

We challenged ourselves to move faster, use digital engineering aggressively, integrate additive manufacturing intelligently, and focus on speed-to-test rather than perfecting requirements on paper for years. The result was a clean-sheet engine on a test stand in eighteen months — something almost unheard of in propulsion.

The Orpheus team didn’t stop at a quick demonstrator, they have continued to mature the engine and architecture and in just three years, Orpheus has completed more than 130 test events across more than 25 engine configurations. That pace allows us to scale faster than traditional programs, adapt architectures, and tailor solutions for different autonomous platforms while maintaining commonality.

Importantly, Orpheus isn’t a science experiment. It’s a scalable engine family concept designed to enable affordable propulsion capabilities across multiple autonomous missions. It gives us the flexibility to respond quickly as CCA requirements mature without restarting development cycles from scratch.

Time is always the critical variable. If a customer can get 90 percent of the capability tomorrow instead of waiting seven or eight years for perfection, that’s often the better operational decision.

Our dual-path approach gives customers options. The AE engine family delivers mature, proven capability immediately. Orpheus delivers rapid adaptability and future scalability. Together, they minimize development risk while preserving flexibility as requirements evolve.

We also take a pragmatic approach to manufacturing innovation. As an example, additive manufacturing is valuable when it reduces part count, simplifies supply chains, and improves producibility, not when it adds unnecessary complexity. In this light, we are constantly balancing the injection of technologies in manufacturing against customer timelines, priorities, and the end value they provide for both newly designed and in-production products. This approach allows us to reduce risk while also providing opportunities to integrate improvements intelligently and scale them up where and when needed.

International collaboration is no longer aspirational, it’s operational reality. We’re seeing real alignment among allies on requirements, interoperability, and industrial cooperation for future autonomous systems.

Uniquely, Rolls-Royce has whole engine capability in three countries, as a company with deep engineering and manufacturing capabilities in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, Rolls-Royce is naturally positioned to enable that collaboration. We’re already exploring ways to leverage cross-Atlantic development and manufacturing in ways that accelerate delivery while strengthening allied supply chains.

For CCA and future autonomous platforms, that kind of industrial flexibility becomes a strategic advantage and allows us to balance the regional needs of our customers while exploring the synergies and opportunities provided by our global capabilities.

Three things.

First, we already power operational autonomous aircraft today across high altitude ISR, carrier aviation, and long-endurance missions. That experience matters.

Second, we offer a credible dual-path solution: proven engines ready now and a next-generation engine family designed for rapid scalability as well as the ability to leverage years of technology investments when needed.

Third, we understand that propulsion must solve real mission problems like range, power, survivability, integration, and affordability — not just meet paper specifications.

The Air Force doesn’t have the luxury of waiting. Neither do we. We’re ready to deliver capability at speed, reduce risk for the customer, and evolve alongside the mission as CCA matures.