AV, a new company formed by a merger of Aerovironment and Blue Halo, unveiled its Red Dragon loitering munition at SOF Week 2025 in Tampa. (Andrew White / Breaking Defense)
SOF WEEK — Less than a week after AeroVironment closed its deal to purchase Blue Halo and create a defense firm called simply AV, the new firm’s CEO told Breaking Defense the combined enterprise is pursuing defense programs on a number of fronts — including future collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) competitions.
“We are tracking government acceleration areas and CCA could well be part of the future growth of the company,” Wahid Nawabi, also AV’s chairman and president, told Breaking Defense in an interview at SOF Week here in Tampa.
“We are not limited to one particular size of platforms and certainly looking at the higher end of the market as well and responding to DoD requirements,” he added.
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Unveiling AV’s latest Red Dragon fixed-wing loitering munition system, Nawabi illustrated how AV will be focused on delivering solutions en masse, with potential to deliver “tens of thousands” of platforms every month.
“The government is looking to send autonomous platforms in volume and with multiple launchers, so in one hour, we could see hundreds or thousands in the air,” Nawabi said.
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To be better positioned, Nawabi said he expected AV in the coming months to be added to the Defense Innovation Unit’s Blue UAS Cleared List, which vets drone production for any national security concerns.
“On board Red Dragon for example, we have less than 150 unique components, nothing of which comes from China,“ he added.
According to Nawabi, Red Dragon has been “tested in battlefield hundreds, if not thousands times in a contested environment,” although he was unable to comment on specific customers and areas of operation.
However, he could disclose Red Dragon has previously conducted test flights in Ukraine, designed to be tested against enemy EW systems.
Finally, though he wouldn’t comment on Red Dragon’s manufacture capacity, Nawabi claimed there is plenty of interest in Red Dragon from DIU’s Replicator initiative, designed to “accelerate delivery of innovative capabilities to the warfighter at speed and scale”.
“We will wait for them to announce it,” he concluded.
