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The Air Force’s next-gen fighter has moved into a critical new phase
By Stephen Losey
Jun 1, 02:46 PM
The Air Force’s secretive and highly classified Next Generation Air Dominance fighter program has started its crucial engineering and manufacturing development phase, Secretary Frank Kendall said Wednesday.
In a discussion at the Heritage Foundation, Kendall said the Air Force began early experimental prototyping on NGAD in 2015, when he was the Pentagon’s top acquisition official. This was essentially an X-plane program, he said, designed to reduce risk and develop key technologies needed for the production program.
The technology has continued to progress, he said, and the NGAD effort is now envisioned as a “family of systems” incorporating several elements, including a handful of autonomous drone aircraft accompanying the manned aircraft in formation.
It typically takes the Air Force’s acquisition programs almost seven years to reach initial operating capability from the beginning of the EMD phase. Although the service has already been working on NGAD for about that long, because it just recently started work on the EMD phase, it will still be several more years before the program will reach IOC.
“The clock really didn’t start in 2015; it’s starting roughly now,” Kendall said. “We think we’ll have capability by the end of the decade.”
The Air Force’s next-gen fighter has moved into a critical new phase
Air Force Sec. Frank Kendall hopes NGAD will show its capabilities by the end of the decade.
www.defensenews.com
WOW. Surprising! Still, just like the article points out, the 6th Gen program isn't exactly new, it has been in the making for quite some time. There is the potential misconception of assuming the X-Plane took to the skies in the span one year, taking for granted what the USAF says, when it could've been flying since 2017 or earlier and they just decided to keep it secret for a while. If that's the case, that would explain the speedy development. Excerpt (From AviationWeek):
[...]however, the newly revealed NGAD flight demonstrator suffers from some drawbacks. The knowledge of DARPA’s AII program dating back to fiscal 2015 suggests an NGAD prototype could have been developed and flown two or three years ago. All schedule, design and performance details of the flight demonstrator remain classified, so there is no way to verify how close the concept validated Roper’s vision for the NGAD program.
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