The U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School is upgrading the X-62A VISTA, an F-16 testbed used for artificial intelligence-piloted flights, to allow AI agents to control the settings of the aircraft’s sensors, according to Rachel Kinard, the school’s director of research.
In previous tests, AI agents could change the control surfaces of the VISTA — short for Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft — and receive input from other onboard sensors, but these agents could not adjust sensor settings. The upgrade will add that ability.
Dubbed the Mission System Upgrade or MSU, the modifications are being done in collaboration with Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. The goal is to ensure the X-62 can test and evaluate increasingly advanced AI tools for a larger number of in-flight tasks.
The MSU is being funded by the Test Resource Management Center, which did not provide further information, and the Test Pilot School, which said it contributes a “small amount” of funding, but did not provide an exact figure.
An Air Force spokesperson said the proposed fiscal year 2027 funding for the X-62 program is $15.7 million, up from the $6.5 million it received for fiscal 2026.
Following the upgrade, “we are going to be able to do something with the X-62 that nobody has ever done before, which is have agents actually control mission systems within the airplane,” said Noel Zamot, a mission systems specialist at the Test Pilot School.
X-62 disassembly began a few months ago. By mid-October, the aircraft looks as though “some little elf just started taking panels out and pulling wire,” Zamot said. “It’s like something has disgorged from the vehicle.”
The “core” of the X-62 is a standard F-16 flight computer, Kinard said. Attached to this is the Variable Stability System software — “like a flight simulator” — and a protective “safety trip.” This allows the X-62 to fly by copying the aircraft model in the simulator. Linked to the VSS is the System for Autonomous Control of the Simulation (SACS), a computer box added in 2020 that allows an AI agent to pilot the aircraft model within the simulator and, by extension, the X-62 itself.
The ongoing upgrade will add the System for Autonomous Mission Systems, or SAMS, Kinard said. This computer box will allow AI agents to control the sensors and, crucially, will be linked to the SACS, so AI agents in the SACS and SAMS can interact.
Raytheon’s PhantomStrike radar, which has a digitally controlled scanning array, is also being added to the aircraft’s nose cone. The company declined to comment.
Kinard said the radar, combined with the other modifications, will allow AI agents to decide “wild numbers of parameters all the way down the signal processing chain, to the raw data that makes up those images on the end of the sensor.”
Gabe Beard, a Lockheed Martin Skunk Works engineering manager, described it as enabling “two-way feedback” between sensor and AI agent.
“The complexity is about to explode,” Kinard added.
These expanded capabilities will keep the X-62 on the cutting edge of autonomous research, Zamot said. “There’s a lot of tests and a lot of work on [flight] autonomy. There’s not been a lot of work — to our knowledge — on autonomy that is focused on mission systems [and] that is not necessarily for an airplane that will be uncrewed.”
In preparation for future flights, the Test Pilot School ran a summer campaign with two parallel efforts. In the first component, an AI agent used live sensor data to pilot the X-62 and perform an intercept. In the second component, done in conjunction with the Air Force Research Laboratory, the aircraft carried four additional software and hardware packages ranging from an autonomous agent to a parallel simulator. The flight portion of the campaign spanned two weeks and 27 flights.
The goal, Kinard said, was to practice “bringing systems together simultaneously and having them communicate and play well.”
“That’s the type of pace we’re talking about when we step out into the post-MSU world,” she added. “We’re going to have to do rapid and very closely connected integration tasks and quick flight campaigns.”
The upgrade is slated to conclude sometime in fiscal 2027, culminating in a two-part return-to-flight campaign. First, the X-62 will undergo “checkout flights,” Kinard said, then it will complete flights involving the new sensor capabilities. She declined to provide more details, but noted “both of these are going to happen in FY27.”
