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The Air Force plans to spend $29 billion over the next five years on the NGAD family of systems, including about $20 billion for the F-47 alone.
Capping a plot-twisting, decade-long process to select a worthy successor to the Lockheed Martin F-22, President Donald Trump announced a contract award to Boeing in a hastily arranged Oval Office ceremony while revealing important details about the design, cost, schedule and propulsion for the newly christened F-47.
The landmark contract award clarifies the fighter that will seek to rule the skies for decades ahead and throws a vital lifeline to Boeing Defense and Space, displacing Lockheed Martin’s 30-year monopoly as the provider of the most advanced U.S. tactical fighters.
“The F-47 will be the most advanced, most capable, most lethal aircraft ever built,” Trump said, flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. David Allvin, the Air Force chief of staff.
- Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion options are sidelined
- The fighter’s cost target is set below the F-22 average
The certainty bestowed by Boeing’s contract award marked an abrupt about-face from the doubts that swirled over the last nine months around the future of the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. Last May, the Air Force came within days of awarding the contract and then put the program on a months-long hiatus to conduct a wide-ranging review. Having internally concluded that a next-generation, crewed fighter remained essential for future air campaigns, the Air Force and industry went to work to persuade the president.
Since November, Trump has received a series of personal briefings from Allvin and Lt. Gen. Dale White, military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, as well as Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg and Lockheed CEO James Taiclet. During the election, Trump campaigned on a military modernization strategy under which autonomous systems are prized over further investment in crewed platforms. In the private briefings, the Air Force reportedly emphasized how the new Boeing fighter would rely on a family of autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft to complete missions.
“This plane flies with drones,” Trump said at the ceremony. “It flies with many, many drones, as many as you want.”
In making their case, Air Force leaders forever tied the program to Trump’s second term. The out-of-sequence F-47 designation honors his position as the 47th president, Allvin said on social media, while also paying tribute to the Air Force’s founding in 1947 and the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, a World War II-era fighter that specialized in the ground-attack role.
“[The F-47] is allowing us to look into the future and unlock the magic that is human-machine teaming,” Allvin said. “And as we do that, we’re going to write the next generation of modern aerial warfare with this.”
The White House ceremony also provided new insights into some of the most heavily guarded secrets of what Allvin called the “crown jewel” of the NGAD family of systems.
Most important, Trump revealed that the F-47 is on a fast track to its first flight compared with previous U.S. stealth fighters, and prototypes are expected to be flying within his four-year term. If that schedule holds, Boeing would set a record pace from contract award to first flight. The Lockheed F-35A needed five years after contract award to reach its first flight, marking a one-year improvement over the schedule of the F-22.
But the fast pace for the F-47 comes after an unprecedentedly long six-year flight demonstration phase. In another disclosure, DARPA said in a March 21 statement that Boeing’s NGAD flight demonstrator first flew in 2019. The Air Force previously had said only that the first NGAD X-plane flew before September 2020. DARPA’s Aerospace Projects Office managed the X-plane program, which also included a Lockheed demonstrator that first flew in 2022. By contrast, the competitors for the Advanced Tactical Fighter and Joint Strike Fighter programs flew prototypes for only a year before advancing into engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) for the F-22 and F-35, respectively.
“For the past five years, the X-planes for this aircraft have been quietly laying the foundation for the F-47—flying hundreds of hours, testing cutting-edge concepts and proving that we can push the envelope of technology with confidence,” Allvin said.
The EMD program is expected to continue into the early 2030s, but the timing for the initial operational capability (IOC) milestone remains unknown. The Air Force will seek to avoid repeating the F-22’s and F-35’s costly, 15-year paths to IOC. Even so, the F-47 may still take a decade or longer to reach the first operational squadrons.
The Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider stealth bomber is on schedule, having been in flight testing since November 2023, according to the Air Force. But the B-21’s undisclosed IOC is still on the horizon as the program approaches the 10-year anniversary of its contract award in October 2015.
The F-47’s record-setting schedule outpaces the readiness of a new propulsion technology long associated with the NGAD fighter. The two competitors for the Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) program are still several years away from flight testing. GE Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney completed the detailed designs for the XA102 and XA103 engines in February, but that means the first engines for ground testing are only now entering fabrication. Delivering a flight-certified variant of either NGAP engine, tailored for the F-47, could take several more years.
The Air Force has decoupled the NGAP from the F-47 development schedule. Instead of developing engines specifically for the fighter, the NGAP program is qualifying a generic adaptive turbofan engine that, if it works, could be modified to fit a specific aircraft.
“NGAP’s engine architecture is platform-agnostic, and designs can be tailored to an extent for future fighter and other aircraft operating across various mission threads,” an Air Force spokesperson said.
While not expected to power the first increment of F-47s, the NGAP-funded adaptive engines remain an “essential” long-term option for the F-47, the spokesperson said, noting potential improvements in range, power generation and thermal management. The program also will help introduce digital processes into the propulsion industrial base. The current NGAP contracts with GE and Pratt for testing prototype engines expire in 2028.
The NGAP engines will not be available in time to power the F-47 flight-test aircraft—and it is not clear when they will enter low-rate initial production. If they follow historic trends, the adaptive turbofans also may not be ready in time to be options for the first lots of low-rate initial production.
As such, the Boeing fighter likely will enter flight testing with an engine that has not been identified yet. Options include more powerful versions of engines likely to be in the same thrust class, such as the Pratt & Whitney F119 and GE Aerospace F110.
Executives of both companies have confirmed interest in upgrading those engines with a new compressor, a combustor and turbine technologies gleaned from their work on adaptive turbofan engines. Likewise, the Navy acknowledged that it intends for its F/A-XX program to rely solely on an adaptation of an existing engine, rather than a product of the NGAP program.
In a sense, the opportunity for a propulsion change early in the production cycle of the F-47 points to the unique flexibility in the acquisition strategy. The Air Force wants the fighter’s hardware to be more modular than that of any other military aircraft entering development to date—modular enough to swap out as new technologies become available. The software also should be easy to upgrade as new applications come out. Air Force leaders previously suggested that NGAD aircraft final assembly could change hands over the life of the program.
“The manner in which we put this program together puts more control in the hands of the government, so we can update and adapt at the speed of relevance,” Allvin said.
The program also starts with an aggressive cost goal. Although designed to deliver more speed, stealth and performance than the F-22, the F-47 should be a cheaper aircraft, Allvin said.
The Air Force spent $33.2 billion in procurement funding to buy 195 F-22s, according to the Pentagon’s selected acquisition report for fiscal 2010, the year the program was terminated. Using the Pentagon Green Book’s inflation adjustment formula, that means the average procurement cost of an F-22 in fiscal 2025 dollars is nearly $275 million. That puts the funding target for the F-47 below the Congressional Budget Office’s 2018 estimate for the NGAD fighter of an average procurement cost of $300 million each, assuming a production run of 414 aircraft.
Thus the F-47 contract award becomes the focus for the Air Force and Boeing to seek redemption following more than a decade of badly mismanaged development programs.
The service needs to rescue an aging and possibly outmatched fleet with a new stealth fighter that solves the tactical airpower problems posed by China’s rising military capabilities and is faster, cheaper and better than the F-22.
Having defeated Lockheed’s bid, Boeing needs an F-47-facilitated comeback. The Arlington, Virginia-based manufacturer must solve the contractual disputes and execution flubs that have kept Boeing Defense, Space and Security in near-crisis mode for a half-decade. And its managers and engineers must deliver an advanced new fighter without losing focus on resolving the troubled contracts for the Air Force’s KC-46A tanker, T-7A trainer and VC-25B presidential transport.
The F-47 presents an enticing yet challenging reset button as both the service and the company start the program with clean slates. The Air Force established the Agile Development Office to lead the NGAD program with a fresh perspective. Boeing already has begun construction on a huge manufacturing complex in St. Louis dedicated to F-47 and other NGAD program opportunities.
“When we develop things, there’s a degree of risk there, but at the end of the day, it’s really about, ‘What can we do differently?’” Boeing Defense, Space and Security interim CEO Steve Parker told reporters on March 25 at the Avalon Airshow in Australia. “And that digital environment, that digital engineering [process], we are taking risk [of costly delays] out well ahead of a traditional program.”
—With Robert Wall in Geelong, Australia.
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