Podcast: What You Can Expect From The F/A-XX Decision

Robert Wall:

Welcome to Aviation Week's Check 6 Podcast. It's been a busy time on the defense front, with firings at the Pentagon, Signal group disclosures, another B-21 charge, and much more. But today, we want to look at one of the biggest looming announcements from DOD, the anticipated U.S Navy's source selection on the F/A-XX program, the sea-surface's counterpart to the U.S. Air Force's F-47 NGAD that went to Boeing. 

There's been rumors of an impending announcement now for a few weeks. And Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden on the company's first quarter earnings call recently indicated that something was pending. 

Here to help you understand what is at stake in the F/A-XX competition are Brian Everstine, Aviation Week's Pentagon editor, and Senior Defense Editor Steve Trimble. I'm Robert Wall, your host for today, and Aviation's Week's executive editor for defense and space. 

Brian, perhaps to launch us into our discussion, why don't you catch us up on what you learned about F/A-XX at the recent Sea Air Space Symposium, and what we know about the scope of the program more generally? 

Brian Everstine:

Yeah, as you mentioned, we've been pretty much expecting an imminent contract award for going on about a month now, when reports first started coming out that the downselect was expected on the heels of the Air Force's award. It has been looming over everything in the Navy over the past few weeks. At the Sea Air Space Conference a couple weeks ago, it was everybody taking aside, "Who's going to win? When's announcements coming?" It's been this dark cloud over that we're expecting to drop pretty soon. Though, who knows what that will be? We're coming up into budget season, the budget expected to drop next month. It'll be interesting to see if there's going to be an imminent gigantic contract award right before we'll see the budget, or if it gets slipped to that. 

But what the discussion was among some of the senior Navy leaders is, "We need it." That F/A-XX is definitely needed for the future of naval aviation. The acting CNO Admiral Kilby told reporters that the decision was at the secretary level, which she didn't specify if that was Sec Nav or Secretary of Defense. But then said that, "They need to come a decision soon, that the Navy needs it." I talked with the Air Boss Admiral Cheever who says that he really needs it for carrier aviation to see the mix of fourth, fifth, and sixth generation on the Navy carriers coming in the next few decades. 

It's expected, it's needed. One open question that I've had that was played down by Admiral Cheever and some of the other Navy leaders is how could really this be affordable? The Navy obviously has a shipbuilding bill coming due, they're trying to do F/A-XX, they're trying to do a few other big programs. But there is an understanding that they can kind of afford it within the budget level that they have. One key aspect of that I think that is feeding into it is the capabilities that they're looking at for F/A-XX, or maybe potentially lack thereof. Not looking at gigantic, huge leaps in technology, not looking at an adaptive engine. Looking at more of a derivative engine. 

One, probably the only real big, solid detail that did come out about F/A-XX recently was from N98, the head of airfare requirements for the Navy, Admiral Donnelly, said that they're looking at a 25% jump in range for the F/A-XX compared to current carrier-based fighters. Which is an increase, but could maybe be a bit of a let-down when you're looking at a generational jump in aircraft. I know we're going to get a little bit more into some of that. 

Hopefully, we're going to see a down select soon, hopefully we'll get more of an idea of where the Navy wants to go. But that's the open question going on right now.  

Steve Trimble:

Yeah. Thanks, Brian, for that good synopsis of where things stand at the moment. Yeah, that 25% range, I think is very significant. I think we're going to dive into that. But also, the engine. That was something that Admiral Donnelly, Vice Admiral Donnelly at N98 told us about back in November. When we got this exclusive interview where we really laid out some of the more significant details of where they had ended up with the F/A-XX requirements. 

One of them, because there had been so much attention on adapted propulsion going back years, really 2006 when the adaptive engine technology program got started at Air Force Research Laboratory. The Navy was part of that for many years. They had a side program, a parallel program called VCAT that was very similar. There was a lot of cross interest, and funding, and participation between the two services on that. But he confirmed that, in fact, next generation adapted propulsion won't be the engine choice for F/A-XX and that they'll use a derivative of an existing military engine. 

That's really interesting, because when you're talking about that, what immediately comes to mind is something like the F135, which is the engine that powers the F-35. That's not really possible for a tactical aircraft because we're going to assume, this may be a wrong assumption, but for a next generation carrier-based fighter that doesn't have a STOVL, a short takeoff and vertical landing requirement, that it's going to be a twin-engine aircraft. A twin-engine aircraft, for a fighter, really you can't put a 245,000 thrust engine side-by-side. Because when you do that, you really get a bomber. That's a huge aircraft, just to have the structure to accommodate this five-foot diameter inlet for both engines. 

You're going to have two smaller engines, probably in that 30,000 pound thrust, a 35,000 pound thrust with afterburner, in that range. That puts you in, if you're going with an existing engine among the American options, obviously that's a pretty safe bet for F/A-XX, you have either Pratt and Whitney F119, or the GE F110. I think this is relevant, both for F-47, the US Air Force fighter, as well as the F/A-XX, that we're going to see one of those engines power one or both of those fighters. 

We heard from the Air Force that next generation adapted propulsion remains a longterm option for F-47, but it is probably not base lined in the short term for increment one. Rather, it's going to be a derivative of an existing engine. Which one is it? So far, GE has released two statements acknowledging that the F-47 contract has been awarded to Boeing and that they're very pleased about this. Pratt Whitney has said nothing. Now in these types of classified programs, that's actually kind of a huge tip-off that it's probably GE that won the contract.  

Robert Wall:

That's really interesting. I'm also curious, since we're on the industrial side, let's briefly, before we talk about what this all means for the Navy and the program, let's maybe briefly touch on prime levels, we've actually not said. As far as we know, the only remaining competitors are Boeing and Northrop Grumman. What's interesting there of course is they've been partners on the Hornets/Super Hornet for quite a long time. Now they are competing against each other here.

I'm curious what you guys both make of this. Northrop didn't bid, decided not to bid, and got in the end. Which makes you probably think maybe they're all in on this. Boeing's been in both and won one. Not sure we want to handicap it necessarily, but I'm wondering if you guys can give us, our listeners, a bit of perspective on what's at play here and what this means from an industrial perspective?  

Steve Trimble:

I can talk about the different advantages that each company can bring to the table. They both have had a long relationship with the Navy. Grumman goes back to the 1940s and so does McDonnell, the legacy part of Boeing that became part of Boeing later. And Douglas, for that matter. That continues to this day. Northrop has a huge role with the Navy with the E2D. They're essentially the OEM for the electronic attack version of the Super Hornet, which is the A-18G Growler, in the sense that they provide the mission system, plus they do the center fuselage. 

It's also interesting to note that in this competition between Northrop and Boeing, Northrop produced the Hornet. That was their fighter back in the early 1970s in the Lightweight Fighter Competition. It was the Cobra, that was the internal name for it. But when it came time to offer it to the Navy, the Navy wasn't comfortable awarding a carrier-based fighter contract to Northrop, so they forced Northrop to partner with McDonnell Douglas at the time, which later became Boeing. Now Boeing owns the Super Hornet, even though it was actually designed and produced as a prototype by Northrop, which is just an interesting thing. 

But Northrop also has the capacity to do digital engineering and digital design at a very high level. We've seen that with the B-21. And we've seen them spin up prototypes from a digital engineering ecosystem very quickly from their Scaled Composites Unit with the Model 401 Sierra test aircraft, as well as the Model 437, which we saw emerge just last year. That's really what they're bringing to the table. 

Now Boeing, they've had a lot of struggles. That's not a secret to anybody, especially on the defense side. Well, also on the commercial side. But on the defense side and on their fixed price contracts, they've just been getting hammered, losing a lot of money on those programs and facing a lot of setbacks in terms of the execution. But for the Navy programs, they've actually had a pretty good run. Super Hornet worked out pretty well for the Navy. They got way more than they were expecting when they started the program. E-18G, it pretty much worked out just like how the Navy had planned. The P-8A has been cited as a model acquisition program. It did take a bit longer to get the full capability into that airframe, but it worked out fairly well. They do have a pretty good relationship with the Navy, even to this day. 

We know of two X planes that are awarded through the Next Generation Air Dominance Program. One went to Boeing and that first flew in 2019. The other one went to Lockheed Martin and that flew in 2022. We don't know that Northrop has a government-funded operational prototype for their Next Generation Air Dominance aircraft. That is a little bit significant when you consider that this is a supersonic aircraft. That's just something that Northrop hasn't done for a long time, now, it's not beyond Northrop's capacity and we've been doing supersonic aircraft since 1947. Northrop has done plenty of them, but nothing new in the last 40 years that also has all these advanced features built in as well. That's one other aspect of this where Boeing brings something to the table that Northrop may not have. 

Then the other thing is Boeing went out and they made these very public investments were $2 billion in infrastructure, just building in the manufacturing capacity to work on these advanced new aircraft. If you drilled down to their project in St. Louis to create this advanced combat aircraft facility, they have two final assembly buildings planned. In phase one, it's believed to be the Air Force F-47 assembly building that's being erected right now. Then there's a follow-on phase two that is supposed to work on the Navy final assembly. Well, I'm assuming it's to work on the Navy final assembly building. Of course, they could put collaborative combat aircraft if they win any future increments of that, and maybe other things. But that's how they set that up.

They have the capacity. They made this upfront investment in the land, in the infrastructure, they got all the permits approved. They went through all those processes to be ready to start on this right away. I think that might be a significant part of this. Both companies bring certain advantages to the table. What we don't know of course is what the actual requirements are and how the proposals, and the pricing, and all that was factored in. That stuff, we don't know.  

Robert Wall:

Brian, I'm curious, did you get a sense at Navy League or something else, who seemed more desperate, who seemed confident? Is there anything you picked up or just vibes?  

Brian Everstine:

Well, as Steve was talking, I was remembering back to I was at the Tail Hook Convention back in 2023 when the Navy first announced, laid out the competitors, back when Lockheed was still in it. The very first company I talked to right out of the gate giving me a statement was Northrop to lay down their digital engineering expertise, how they're well-positioned to support the Navy, bringing up also the E2 expertise. 

Then over the past couple years, it seems like every update we get on timeline doesn't come from the Navy, doesn't come from the Pentagon, it's been coming from Kathy Warden in her earnings calls. She's been the one updating us on timeline for this award. You had mentioned she had mentioned it this week. There seem to be some confidence on the Northrop Grumman side. 

Boeing is usually a little reticent to talk sixth gen. They couldn't even say the letters NGAD for a while. When I was talking to the Air Boss, I was also speaking with Dan Gillian, their head of air dominance. They were talking about MQ-25 is supposed to get its first flight. When we asked about F/A-XX, Admiral Cheever pointed to Dan and said, "They also have a lot riding on this." I would say Northrop was happy to talk, more so than probably Boeing has been over the past couple years.  

Robert Wall:

Interesting. Let's briefly talk about what it actually means for the Navy.  

Steve Trimble:

This decision for the Navy is so important. If you think about the surface fleet is designed around the aircraft carrier and the carrier strike group. The whole point of that is to project power with these carrier-based fighters and aircraft. The big question is, and the question I still have in my mind is, does the Navy have the requirements right for this aircraft to participate in a scenario that involves South China Sea and the Taiwan Straight? Which are the most I'd say relevant military scenarios and the most stressing of the military scenarios for the foreseeable future for the US. 

When you think about that context, that does impose certain very strenuous requirements in your aircraft design, especially for a carrier-based fighter which has limited space. You've got these huge distances between friendly air bases in the Pacific. And you have China's ability to project their own military capabilities in the forms of just a smorgasbord of anti-ship weapons. Whether they be ballistic missiles like the DF-21D, or the CM-400. Or the CM-401, I forget what the Chinese designation of that is. But anyway, a short-range ballistic missile. But they also have anti-ship cruise missiles, a whole variety of them. They have those capabilities to fire those and fire hundreds of them at the carrier battle group. 

What you need for the aircraft carrier to participate in this in a way that's somewhat safe, it's a war so it's not safe, but you don't want to take undue risk with a platform as large and with so much capacity as an aircraft carrier. You want to be able to have your fighters be able to fly defensive air patrols 1000-miles from the carrier because they need to go after the launching systems for these ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. Then the ones that actually still get through, you have to hunt those down and shoot them down before they approach the carrier. You need to have this aircraft with a significant amount of range. It needs to operate 800 to 1000 nautical miles. 

Now when we heard about that 25% increase, that's on a baseline of it's replacing the Super Hornet, that's got about 635 nautical miles. If it's 25% more than that, then you're talking about 750 nautical miles. F-35C is around 660, 670 nautical miles notionally on paper. 25% is a little bit higher than that, if that's what they're using as the baseline for that 25% figure. It doesn't quite get you to that 800 to 1,000 nautical mile range. 

Now, they do have MQ-25s on the deck, so that can provide you 1500 pounds of fuel at 500 nautical miles' radius from the carrier, so that can keep them out on station for much longer. Except 15,000 of fuel doesn't go very far with these aircraft. Keep in mind that the internal fuel volume of an F-35C is 19,300 pounds, which is greater than the entire fuel offload capacity of one MQ-25. This aircraft would probably carry even more than that. It helps, but it doesn't solve all your problems. 

I was a little disappointed to hear about the 25% range increase. I would think it needs to be in that 33% to 50% increase. Of course, then you've got an issue with trying to get an aircraft with that much internal fuel volume to land on a carrier and to operate from a carrier with the limited geometry and space that you have in that context. That's one of the issues. 

The other is just a philosophical thing, because I think of the 1980s Top Gun, when we think about that height of carrier-based aviation, you had F-14 on the deck doing long range fleet air defense. That was backed up by the classic version of the Hornet doing air superiority, with the 86 doing long range strike and a variant for electronic warfare. Today, fast-forward 40 years, Super Hornet is now doing that long range intercept for fleet defense and air superiority. Then you've got F-35 doing that A-6 role of long range strike, and the EA-18G replacing EA-6B. Those are two multirole fighters, they're almost interchangeable. F-35C can do fleet air defense as well as probably the Super Hornet, if not better. There are some things a Super Hornet can do, it can carry AIM-174 that the F-35C can't, at least internally, that makes it good at that long range intercept role. 

What you don't have and what I thought F/A-XX would give them the opportunity to do, was to go back to that highly specialized, optimized fleet air defense fighter, like the modern version of the F-14. I'm not saying an F-14 itself, but a new aircraft that was designed principally around a single mission of fleet air defense. They chose not to do that. That was one of the things Admiral Donnelly also told me back in November, is that they can't afford to go to those highly specialized single-mission type designs. Everything on the carrier needs to be multirole, needs to do a lot of different jobs. 

Now that makes a lot of sense. There's only so much you can do on a carrier, only so many aircraft you can put on, even on a Ford-class carrier. But you are compromising the design, your ability to do any particular mission, if you're designing it to do a whole bunch of different missions. That's really the tension inherent with all these things, but it just means that we're going to have another multirole fighter. And really, between the F-35C and whatever F/A-XX becomes, we're going to have two different multirole fighters on the deck. That's a little surprising to me.  

Robert Wall:

Yeah, interesting. Before we wrap it up here, perhaps one more thing. Brian, we also had some comments here from Lockheed, who are not in the F/A-XX competition and lost on NGAD obviously in the recent days. That, A, they wouldn't protest on the F-47. But also, they kind of laid out their strategy on basically how they want to play in this space going forward. Just give us a quick synopsis on Lockheed's future fighter plan is, so to speak?  

Brian Everstine:

My understanding seems to be that Lockheed went a little too far, went a little too exquisite on F/A-XX to meet the Navy's requirements. In the earnings call this week, we got a preview of where Lockheed really wants to go, and that's just double-down on F-35, take some of the lessons learned from their NGAD design to bolster up. They say, "Turn the F-35 into a Ferrari," going by the NASCAR type upgrades, add advanced sensors, advanced technologies to make that a fifth-and-a-half type generation fighter. Which is a bold statement coming right now. Lockheed's having a lot of trouble meeting the needed F-35 requirements for Block 4 Tech Refresh 3 that's been long delayed, been very needed, and getting some consternation from the Pentagon on meeting that schedule. 

Steve, if you want to add?  

Steve Trimble:

The strategy that they laid out yesterday is what you'd expect them to have to say. What else can they say? They don't have F-47 and they're not in the running for F/A-XX anymore. When they talk about the future of aeronautics they say, "Well, hey, we've already got an aircraft in production and an aircraft in service, we can keep upgrading those. We can take 80% of the capability that we were developing for the sixth generation, and we believe we can insert those into our existing fighters at half the cost compared to what's going to happen with F-47 and F/A-XX." 

I do wonder how they actually do that, because those capabilities do come with a certain amount of cost. I assume it's not going to be the tailless plane form that we're expecting for F-47, you can't do that with the F-35. But there's other things they can do. Much more advanced power and thermal management system we know is already baseline coming after Block 4 for F-35. New types of radar capabilities, electronic warfare capabilities. Networking and the ability to control autonomous aircraft from these single-pilot cockpits is also something they can continue developing on those things.

But they also might have a point. Because Boeing, with the F-47, has got to figure out how to execute this and they've got to keep the program sold. That's always a challenge, especially when you've already got a production line that is already out there in Fort Worth, and Cameri, Italy, and Nagoya, Japan that is pumping out 156 aircraft a year. At least, it has that capacity. Obviously, it's been a while since they've taken that many because of the various issues that they've been having. They continue to have some of those issues, so that's part of this, too. They've got to work those out in Fort Worth. But they have something on the table in production. Sometimes that's all you need to actually get this done and present an attractive alternative. 

It doesn't hurt, in Lockheed's vision of the future, that although the Air Force program is very fully funded, F-47 has got $20 billion in the FYDP, the Navy gutted the funding for F/A-XX over a year ago. When they submitted their fiscal year 2025 budget to Congress, it reduced the amount of money that they had set aside for this program by 20, 25 percent. Sorry, that was all that was left. They actually reduced it by almost 70% over that period, compared to where it had been just the previous year. They haven't restored it yet, so it's also a mystery that they're awarding this contract now even though they really can't pay for it, certainly on the pace that they were envisioning just a couple years ago. That's another mystery. Maybe they expect Congress to bail them out, or this huge Trump funding increase that has been talked about, maybe some of that will go to this. But there's a lot of other mouths to feed with things that they've started, so that's just another part of this that we have to see how that works out.  

Robert Wall:

Right. Well, I suggest we arrest the podcast here. We'll obviously be back once we know who won F/A-XX, maybe soon. Thank you, Steve, thank you, Brian, for jumping on this topic. Thanks to our producer Guy Ferneyhough as well for his help. Of course, as always, thank you, all our listeners, for giving us your time and attention. Please come back for another episode of Check 6, back soon. Thanks much, and maybe that one too on F/A-XX.