Anduril wins deal to help design future aircraft

The U.S. Air Force has awarded Anduril Industries a contract worth up to $85 million to develop computer-based design tools for future aircraft, part of a push to design and test new systems digitally before building physical hardware.

The Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, made the award under a program called VOLARE, short for Digital System-Level Mission-Driven Integrated Design Methods for Aerospace Systems.

The contract is structured as an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity agreement, meaning the $85 million is a ceiling rather than a guaranteed payout, and the Air Force will issue individual task orders against it as work is needed. Eight companies competed for the award. Anduril will do the work in Dayton, Ohio, and the contract runs through Sept. 17, 2036, giving it a 10-year window.

The program covers two related goals: building a software product that can model an aircraft’s overall vehicle systems, and developing methods for designing thermal management systems, the cooling architecture that keeps an aircraft’s engines, electronics and sensors from overheating. Modern military aircraft pack increasing amounts of high-power radar, computing and directed-energy equipment into the same airframe, and managing the heat that equipment generates has become a design challenge in its own right rather than an afterthought.

No money has been obligated on the base contract itself. The Air Force has funded only the first task order, worth $50,000 in fiscal 2026 research money, with additional funding expected to follow as later task orders are issued.

The award adds to Anduril’s growing work in digital engineering for military aircraft and missiles. The company won a Naval Postgraduate School and Office of Naval Research prize in April 2026 for a proposal that combined digital modeling, simulation and flight testing into a single development process for tactical missiles, an approach the judges described as a credible way to speed up how new weapons move from concept to prototype. AFRL’s Aerospace Systems Directorate, based at Wright-Patterson, has pursued similar digital modeling tools for aircraft thermal systems for more than a decade, including earlier government-funded research into software for simulating aircraft cooling systems.