This paper presents a novel adaptive fading cubature Kalman filter (AFCKF) based on double transitive factors. The developed adaptive algorithm is explained in two stages; stage (i) a single transitive factor is used to update the predicted state error covariance, ${\bf \hat P_{k}}^{-}$ based on innovation or residual vector, whereas, in stage (ii), the measurement noise covariance matrix, ${\bf \hat R_{k}^{*}}$ is scaled by another transitive factor. Furthermore, showing the proof concept for estimation of the process noise, ${\bf \hat Q_{k}^{*}}$ and measurement noise covariance matrices by combining the innovation and residual vector in the AFCKF algorithm. It can provide reliable state estimation in the presence of unknown noise statistics. Bench-marking target tracking example is considered to show the performance improvement of the developed algorithms. As compared with existing adaptive approaches, the proposed fading algorithm can provide better estimation results.