Air Force Eyes Merlin Autonomy System for Entire Tanker Fleet

Boston-based Merlin Labs is the beneficiary of the 19-month, undisclosed value contract—first reported by FLYING—that aims to give current and future American tankers the ability to adapt missions on the fly without human intervention.

The partnership, a collaboration with the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command and Air Force Research Laboratory, will address “the most pressing mission challenges in the USAF,” according to Merlin. Engineers will develop an automated flight re-planning system for a plethora of operation types including aerial refueling, humanitarian air drops, deployment of aerial munitions, and intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) missions.

The idea is to allow pilots to focus fully on their mission, eliminating tasks that distract from that objective. Matt George, founder and CEO of Merlin, told FLYING these dynamic replanning capabilities will enable extended-crew operations, such as 40-plus-hour flights, and, eventually, fully uncrewed tanker operations.

George said the collaboration will focus on automating tanker missions using the company’s Merlin Pilot—a platform-agnostic, “takeoff-to-touchdown” flight autonomy system he believes could eventually be integrated across the entire USAF tanker fleet.

“This agreement will ultimately bring high levels of autonomy to the KC-135 [Stratotanker], which is the workhorse of aerial refueling,” George told FLYING. “In addition to foundational flight autonomy, we’ll begin to layer in mission autonomy skills. For instance, leveraging AI to enable the tanker to dynamically retask itself to best provide fuel to receiver aircraft.”

The new, 19-month agreement builds on Merlin’s existing work with USAF to demonstrate autonomous operations with the KC-135. A contract awarded in February calls for the firm to design, integrate, test, and—by early 2025—perform an in-flight demonstration of the Merlin Pilot aboard the aerial refueling tanker.

Merlin will begin that series of basic air refueling operations with reduced crew workloads before eventually reducing the size of the crew itself. The test campaign will be a crucial step toward developing the certification basis for Merlin Pilot to achieve FAA Part 25 airworthiness, a requirement for the modified aircraft to begin transporting cargo and passengers for customers. The company’s airworthiness plan for autonomous KC-135 testing was accepted by the Air Force in November.

Merlin is also working under a $105 million contract to automate U.S. Special Operations Command’s fleet of C-130J Super Hercules transporters. The contract opens the door for the technology to be integrated across the broader special operations forces (SOF) fixed-wing fleet.

The company’s automated Cessna Grand Caravan—which it calls “Big Red”—meanwhile, is in the midst of what it describes as certification-ready testing. The test campaign, which George in September told FLYING will finish in the third quarter of 2025, is expected to culminate in an FAA supplemental type certification (STC) that can be applied to other Part 23 aircraft types and classes—including the KC-135 and C-130J. The STC would authorize Merlin to modify those aircraft with Merlin Pilot.

Pilot is a platform-agnostic hardware and software system that Merlin says will make decisions just like a human, at first serving as an AI copilot next to a human safety pilot. Eventually, though, the goal is to remove the safety pilot on smaller aircraft.

Data collected from an array of external sensors and cameras is processed by flight control computers before being fed into Pilot, which allows the system to know exactly where the aircraft is and where it’s going. It then sends commands to actuators connected to the aircraft to manipulate control surfaces. In the case of a disruption to the flight profile, the system can generate alternative routes for a pilot to approve or assist with an emergency landing.

Pilot uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand commands from a range of accents and voice types and can “speak” directly to ATC. The safety pilot can step in if anything gets lost in translation.

“This new [contract] scope is the first addition of a mission autonomy element to Merlin’s flight autonomy core on the KC-135,” George said. “Merlin Pilot will demonstrate its ability to successfully operate during a refueling mission, within the bounds of current Air Force operations. Dynamic replanning and NLP-based communication automation are key components of this demonstration.”

In addition to the KC-135, C-130J, and Cessna Caravan, Merlin Pilot has been integrated on the Beechcraft King Air, de Havilland Twin Otter, Rutan Long-EZ, and Cozy Mark IV. The Air Force tankers, though, are on track to be the first aircraft to see what the system can do in real-world settings.

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