DEFENSE NEWS
The Pentagon has awarded the long-awaited contract for the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance future fighter jet, known as NGAD, to Boeing, President Donald Trump announced Friday.
The sixth-generation fighter, which will replace the F-22 Raptor, will be designated the F-47, Trump said. It will have “state-of-the-art stealth technologies [making it] virtually unseeable,” and will fly alongside multiple autonomous drone wingmen known as collaborative combat aircraft.
“It’s something the likes of which nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said in an Oval Office announcement with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin and Lt. Gen. Dale White, the Air Force’s military deputy for acquisition, technology and logistics. “In terms of all the attributes of a fighter jet, there’s never been anything even close to it, from speed to maneuverability to what it can have [as] payload. And this has been in the works for a long period of time.”
“America’s enemies will never see it coming,” he continued.
The competition for NGAD was between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, after Northrop Grumman announced in 2023 that it would not compete for the program as a prime contractor.
A statement from Boeing was not immediately available.
Allvin said in a statement Friday that experimental versions of the NGAD have been flying for the last five years, “flying hundreds of hours, testing cutting-edge concepts and proving that we can push the envelope of technology with confidence.”
Allvin said the significant advance experimentation and work on the F-47 will allow the service to fly the jet by the end of Trump’s administration…
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