Coinciding with the 2025 Paris Air Show, where both civilian and military planemakers show off their new goods to potential customers, Boeing has flown a first-ever demonstration of an in-air pilot commanding multiple drone fighter jets. Onboard a Royal Australian Air Force E-7A Wedgetail, the remote operator issued commands to two MQ-28 Ghost Bat drones (and a third simulated one), getting them to fly ahead of the crewed plane in a protective formation.
While the MQ-28 was first unveiled in 2019, its promise of allowing a single operator on one plane to command multiple other aircraft in combat-style maneuvers had never been demonstrated until now. It is also a test case of the platform’s so-called “loyal wingman” philosophy, in which, unlike MQ-9 Reaper drones, the unmanned fighters are controlled from a nearby crewed aircraft as a multiplier to its capabilities. In principle, this is a cheaper (both in budget and in risk to living aircrew) way to put a lot of airpower in the sky than what militaries have been doing up to now.
Certainly, that’s the sales pitch Boeing is trying to make at the Paris Air Show. Per Flight Global, the company is actively looking to expand the drone’s customer base into European militaries. At the moment, the Ghost Bat’s primary customer is Australia, which is in fact directly leading the design. U.S. interest has, so far, been more muted.
The future of drone warfare
The “M” in MQ-28 stands for “multirole,” meaning the platform is intended to do various tasks for whatever military is using it. This could include communications, early warning, and electronic warfare. It could even mean carrying ordnance, meaning it could conduct air-to-air or air-to-ground combat. Boeing’s claim is that the Ghost Bat is immensely flexible, one of its key selling points.
To that end, the MQ-28 sports a modular nose. That front tip of the aircraft is where all the sensor payload goes, so the ground crew could quickly swap out, say, a radar nose for an electronic warfare nose to meet any given mission requirements. The company notes that this also allows for rapid innovation, so if somebody comes up with a clever use-case that nobody else thought of, all they need is a new nose, not a whole new drone.
The general idea here is that an old-school crewed plane can be a sort of “shark” surrounded by a number of drone “remoras” that, all together, can do a lot more than the crewed plane alone could do. The drones (categorically known as collaborative combat aircraft, or CCAs) still need to take commands from a nearby operator, but that person would be on the crewed plane, rather than back at base. Using artificial intelligence, the CCAs would take basic instructions, like “Fly over there and scan for enemies,” and figure out the specific flight details on its own, as opposed to being directly piloted remotely.
The cutting edge, or already outdated?
A CCA like a Ghost Bat will be cheap compared a traditional piloted fighter jet. The F-15EX, the newest variant of a decades-old airframe, costs over $90 million per plane. The MQ-28, by contrast, should show up somewhere around the single-digit millions. That allows a military to field a lot of them for the same price has one manned plane, a huge force multiplier. Great, right?
Well, a CCA like a Ghost Bat will also be expensive compared to, say, an off-the-shelf quadcopter drone — or one hundred of them. As Ukraine has proven with its incredible attack on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, we are entering a world where a swarm of cheap drones with explosives strapped to them can cause an enormous amount of damage, both in economic value lost and also to a military’s overall capability. If that’s the future, then maybe the MQ-28 is out of step with where things are headed.
That said, while Ukraine’s drones in that attack leapt out to their targets in seconds, it took 18 months of planning to get those drones into Russia. That’s a long time compared to, say, an F-18 with Ghost Bat wingmen flying a strike mission in just a few hours. In other words, nobody really knows what the future holds. But Boeing would sure like to sell you on one particular vision of it.