USAF/US NAVY 6th Generation Fighter Programs - F/A-XX, F-X, NGAD, PCA, ASFS news

There's no need to swing virtual designed aircraft dicks around. The real question will be who can produce what. We will figure that out in a few years.
 
bobbymike said:
The Skunk Works head separately said digital engineering has reduced aircraft build times by two-thirds as business has exploded in recent years.
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From the interview its clear that they're referring to Concept-Design-Build-Test rather than just "build". Which is dependent on having good models linked together in a common framework - which is robust enough to serve a variety of concepts and configurations.

"So why do we care about that?" Babione asked rhetorically. "Well, it dramatically compresses the time between concept and capability."
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TinWing said:
Woody said:
So nobody knows what it is then :) Cheers.
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It’s more likely that nobody really cares about unmanned aircraft in the same way that enthusiasts did about the manned F-117 and B-2 way back 30 to 35 years ago. Military aerospace does not enjoy the broad public interest that it did a generation ago. Back in the Reagan era, it wasn’t uncommon for a well informed layman to have an opinion on the B-1B program. Try finding one American out of 10,000 who is aware of the B-21 Raider, let alone has an opinion on it. Today, the general public is indifferent. That is both a positive and a negative for military aviation programs. Gone is the insane journalistic criticism of programs that were ultimately successful. On the other hand, without emotional investment from the voting public, there’s no demonstrable grass level support either, except for people and communities effected by defense sector employment.
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People everywhere are little sheep with a mobile they are dead if they lost the mobile , but for sure they know nothing about military aviation.
 
Woody said:
So nobody knows what it is then :) Cheers.
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The US trolling the Chinese, they've been on a roll lately. Mass coverage & speculation by defense forums & blogs does the job of provoking a sense of validity to what was seen, causing a stir within the Chinese intelligence & defense communities.
 
In_A_Dream said:
Woody said:
So nobody knows what it is then :) Cheers.
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The US trolling the Chinese, they've been on a roll lately. Mass coverage & speculation by defense forums & blogs does the job of provoking a sense of validity to what was seen, causing a stir within the Chinese intelligence & defense communities.
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I think 450 new silos in the desert wins the troll game.
 
“We are being more effectively challenged than at any other time in our history,” said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. China’s air force is at parity, and in some cases holds an edge over the U.S. .

Air Force futurist Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote emphasized that the Chinese air force is already “at parity … in key areas” with the capabilities of the U.S. Air Force, and in a few “important areas we’re behind, tonight,” although he didn’t offer specifics.

“The light is blinking red,” Hinote told reporters. “We are out of time.”

www.airforcemag.com

USAF’s Three Priorities: China, China, China | Air & Space Forces Magazine

The alarming speed of China’s military advance is fueling new urgency in the Air Force to accelerate modernization and deter Beijing.
www.airforcemag.com www.airforcemag.com
 
- 25% reduction in development time
- 80% reduction in assembly hours

Also note that Boeing is producing a digital-twin for each and every production tail it delivers to the US Air Force or another future customer.

* Usual caveats
 

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Does 25% reduction in development time also refer to development done during testing, after the first prototype has flown?
Let's assume it does. Testing and development of various subsystems is what takes most of the time, until IOC is declared. Assembly takes far less time anyway.
So if assembly is cut from, say, 30 months to 6 months, that'll certainly help. But it won't make as huge of a dent into overall development timetable as each of those prototypes would be scheduled to be ready by a certain point in time anyway. Until one step is tested (in practice or digitally) the next step won't have its assembly end date scheduled.
So... I still don't see the timespan between first prototype flight and IOC as being under 75% of F-22 timespan (at best) and 75% of F-35A timespan (at worst). Meaning between 6 and 7.5 years.
Sure, compared to F-35 that seems great. But it still wouldn't be terribly fast.
 
No, but more is done during development than before. The multi-domain space that is offered by digital engineering tools and the fidelity that increasingly comes with it decreases drastically testing time (and budgets). Hence the massive cost cuts.
 
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So is the period from first prototype flight to IOC equal to the shortened development period, meaning 25%? Or is it more? Or is it less?
 
IMOHO we can lousily say yes since the picture is incomplete.
It is also specific to Boeing who, we should notice, has been already pioneering Rapid design since more than a decade.
 
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totoro said:
Testing and development of various subsystems is what takes most of the time, until IOC is declared..
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totoro said:
So is the period from first prototype flight to IOC equal to the shortened development period, meaning 25%? Or is it more? Or is it less?

.
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Digital engineering is one of several design, production, development and acquisition reforms/enhancements/upgrades that are aimed at reducing the time it takes to field weapons. The DE tools processes and supply chain integration goes after the problem of rapidly iterating designs (allowing you to field more mature designs faster in the design and build process), design maturity, and being able to reduce the amount of time it takes to build these systems (which traditionally has taken a long learning curve to master). Time is money so if they can sustainably shrink the assembly time then that will directly lead to cost savings and push the learning curve efficiencies to the left allowing bulk, if not all of the production program to benefit from the lower assembly time and cost. Or so is the hope which the capstone "e-series" programs will have to demonstrate. A point worth nothing here is that Boeing took on a fixed price contract as their first major DE application on a large defense program, and that the Air Force rolled it into one of its most costly modernization programs (GBSD) to start off so what they may have seen in smaller or classified applications of these tools must have been really promising.

What you are getting at in terms of qualifying, testing, and de-bugging mission systems, overcoming integration challenges and software development is only partly solved via this. The main things that are going to attempt to go after that are going to be the requirements process, being judicious with how many high payoff / high-risk sub-systems you go with and other modern design and acquisition elements that specifically target these things. That's where adoption of known OMS standards (not just open architectures but full OMS), and agile software development comes in as does the tech stack ownership and other tools like PlatformOne etc.

Also, the traditional goal posts from an acquisition perspective may not be relevant. If it still takes you 10 years to field a system but what you field in year 10 is dramatically more mature, more capable and more refined than what you would have done with a traditional approach then that is a major win and excellent progress. I think that's what Will Roper kind of hinted at during his last interview before he left the DOD. The milestone gates are defined by the acquisition process and law, and the requirements themselves (how lengthy and precise they are) impact how long a contractor spends designing to them, and how long the tester takes to ensure that each and every delivered attribute meets the specified requirements. Those requirements and what's needed to get past the validation and test phase may also be a limiting factor. Even the mature F-15EX is going to take 5-6 years to make its way to an operational unit from when the program was given a green light.

Roper specifically pointed to the maturity of the first (or first few) B-21's relative to early production or pre-production examples from past programs. And the B-21 is using a digital engineering approach but not the full digital acquisition suite that would give it an "e-series" designation. We'll see soon enough how close they actually come to delivering on that.
 
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The thing with maturity is: it's much harder to ascertain for outside viewers like us. it's much harder to prove than saying "see, IOC was just 5 years from first prototype flight".
 
bobbymike said:
www.19fortyfive.com

A New U.S. Stealth Fighter: Do We Really Need A 'Manhattan Project'?

A U.S. Air Force general wants the service to jump through all hurdles and commit the nation’s resources and full attention to developing a sixth-generation fighter plane.
www.19fortyfive.com www.19fortyfive.com
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The wording is ironic, considering the B-29 that dropped the bombs on Japan cost more to develop than the entire Manhattan project. It's also hyperbolic, since there's no way in hell it's going to match the insane transformative power of gaining nuclear capability.
 
totoro said:
The thing with maturity is: it's much harder to ascertain for outside viewers like us. it's much harder to prove than saying "see, IOC was just 5 years from first prototype flight".
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It is a lot easier for those who use these systems and realize that what they get access to much ahead of the maturity curve, when they get their hands on it, compared to systems of the past. That's what counts. In time, this will get added to the acquisition process and we will have a time to measure it through requirements (when you know it works, you can bake these requirements in so that you are asking for more upfront because you know with some confidence that it can be delivered). We can only make sense of these metrics (like prototype to IOC) because those are the traditional acquisition milestones that have existed for years if not decades. But even those are deceptive. Since the DOT&E has been stood up you can't really field half baked products where a lot more needs to be done prior declaring the capability having been delivered. Something like the F-16A, or some of the Army programs from the 80s would probably have taken a lot longer if were designing with a TEMP and DOT&E conducted IOT&E.
 
buy new jets (when a leapfrog in capability) extend F-22 are about the only points...IMHO
Manned Stealth is nowhere near the main show anymore except for those living in their own private (past) idaho.
 
CammNut said:
Here are the graphics from the US Navy presentation at AUVSI. Basically they show how long each of the four designs can stay on station over the target area with the carrier 500nm off shore, or 1,500nm to stay out of range of ballistic missiles (the scenario is a US favourite, war against China).
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do you have the ppt?
 
news.usni.org

Navy Aviation Vision 2030-2035 - USNI News

The following is the Navy Aviation Vision 2030-2035 released this week by the Navy. From the report The National Defense Strategy (NDS) identifies a complex global security environment characterized by overt challenges to the current international order and the resurgence of long-term, strategic...
news.usni.org news.usni.org
 
Manuducati said:
shin_getter said:
canards, clearly stealth isn't a consideration /s
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Not that myth again, please.
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sensors, missiles, DEW defense, UCRAV mothership, buildability, maintainability, cost efectiveness are the mainshows now, not stealth, which is increasingly countered and at longer ranges.

Personnally for canards.

PS: NGAD's engine development still appears to be diminishing returns not worth the investment. hopefully a revolution in the classifed world, otherwise it is industrial Welfare.
 
jsport said:
sensors, missiles, DEW defense, UCRAV mothership, buildability, maintainability, cost efectiveness are the mainshows now, not stealth, which is increasingly countered and at longer ranges.
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FWIW Trimble ((at)TheDEWLine) seems to have subsequently tweeted: "OPNAV said in May 2019 that they don't have a requirement for penetrating stealth and that they're fine with vertical tails." I do not know how definitive a statement that may have been or whether it still holds.
 

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