At Edwards Air Force Base in California,
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works recently joined the US Air Force Test Pilot School and other government and industry partners in hosting US Secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall, to fly in the X-62A Variable in-flight simulation test aircraft (VISTA), a ‘one-of-a-kind aircraft modified to test artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomy capabilities’.
VISTA is an AI pathfinder that facilitates ‘the development and testing of cutting-edge AI techniques with new uncrewed vehicle designs — work that is essential to realising distributed teaming’. In less than a year, the teams installed initial live AI agents into the X-62A’s systems, demonstrated the first AI versus human dogfight and completed over 100,000 lines of flight-critical software changes across 21 test flights.
John Clark, the vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, said: “The need for innovation at speed and scale is greater than ever. The X-62A VISTA is a crucial platform in our efforts to develop, test and integrate AI, as well as to establish AI certification standards that will revolutionise the future of aerospace. Our proven hardware and software architecture enables safe and controlled environments for AI agents and advanced algorithms to rapidly prototype and develop.”
Lockheed Martin says its open systems architecture, which leverages Skunk Works’ ‘Model Following Algorithm’ (MFA) and ‘System for Autonomous Control of the Simulation’ (SACS), enables highly complex tests. “These important updates enhance VISTA’s capabilities while maintaining its rapid-prototyping advantage, allowing for quick changes to software and the ability to conduct flight tests with great frequency, accelerating the pace of AI and autonomy development to meet urgent national defence priorities.
“This architecture has proven to be reliable and robust enough to transition into third-party distributed hardware to replicate safe and controlled flight test objectives, as demonstrated by VISTA. Lockheed Martin is at the forefront of fusing AI-enabled platform autonomy with human oversight to accelerate operational speed, maximise agility, and cut sustainment costs.”