Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) control algorithms are rapidly advancing the aircraft’s mission capability and enhancing its safety. In the research and development stage, such new concepts could jeopardize the aircraft, incur undue risk to a sensor payload, or present a hazard to manned aircraft in shared airspace. Testing proposed control algorithms on a manned surrogate can drastically alleviate many of these risks, thus accelerating development. The United States Air Force (USAF) Test Pilot School (TPS) is developing such a manned surrogate. The surrogate UAV will be controlled by a ground station using experimental control logic. The airborne manned aircraft will be designed with autonomous and manual safety trips to instantly revert the surrogate UAV from experimental mode to its native aircraft mode. This will be particularly valuable for high risk evaluations such as landing tasks, autonomous collision avoidance systems, and autonomous air refueling. Human Vehicle Interface system evaluations can also be safely performed. Conceived evaluations include handling qualities with simulated satellite data link delay, predictive ight path guidance, and high demand low time task evaluations such as a go-around following an approach to landing. Similar evaluations could be performed using simulations, and this could certainly be one of the developmental steps; however, the higher delity of the manned surrogate will also provide insight from the airborne pilot observations. Such feedback will provide valuable data towards replicating manned operational tasks for landing, formation, and station keeping. The USAF TPS development of the manned UAV surrogate system is in a multi-phase cycle. The initial phase is a proof of concept of ground station control of a manned airborne platform, including evaluation of the autonomous and manual safety trips. Subsequent phases will include implementation of experimental control algorithms, real-time ight con