July 30, 2025 – Falls Church, VA —Accelint, through its SoarTech division, is proud to be named one of six inaugural partners for Northrop Grumman Corporation’s (NYSE: NOC) Beacon™ testbed ecosystem, an open-access environment designed to accelerate autonomous flight solutions through real-world testing.
Accelint brings decades of mission-driven autonomy expertise and proven AI capabilities to this groundbreaking partnership.
The Beacon initiative, announced by Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC), is built on over 500,000 autonomous flight hours and is engineered to connect best-in-class commercial autonomy technologies with proven flight software, hardware, and integration infrastructure. Participating partners will leverage the Scaled Composites-built Model 437 Vanguard aircraft for a series of flight demonstrations beginning later this year.
“Beacon represents the kind of forward-leaning innovation we strive for at Accelint,” said Mike Betzer, CEO of Accelint. “It gives us a powerful proving ground to accelerate our autonomy stack, demonstrate our AI-driven capabilities in live mission scenarios, and contribute to the future of defense aviation alongside an incredible group of partners.”
“Beacon is about collaboration across industry between companies of all sizes and expertise,” said Tom Jones, Corporate Vice President and President, Aeronautics Systems, Northrop Grumman. “By providing open access to the Beacon ecosystem, we’re enhancing the innovation, new competition and ultimately the autonomous capabilities that industry can deliver to our customers — with unmatched speed and at scale.”
The Beacon ecosystem is aligned to government reference architectures and is purpose-built to support future aircraft programs by reducing integration risk, improving software readiness, and accelerating time to field. For Accelint, the program provides a critical venue to scale and demonstrate our autonomous systems in operationally relevant environments – furthering our commitment to resilient, AI-enabled decision-making at mission speed.