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

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Interesting angle from the latest Lockheed Martin teaser, what do we think is this a V shaped vertical stab? Would love be right about it not being tailless hehe.

I'd like to propose that the three streams here might merely be a metaphor for the "three streams" involved in the internal processes of adaptive cycle engines like the AETP and NGAP designs, rather than a literal tease hinting that we should expect three engines.

Deflationary interpretations like this aren't always right, but it does seem to be the case that more prosaic interpretations are correct a disappointingly high percentage of the time.
 
Whoever gets to autonomous UAVs with minimal human intervention first will have a huge advantage, particularly if such a platform is short/rough runway capable or runway independent. I doubt anyone is going to completely run out of pilots or maintainers any time soon, but having an aircraft that is quicker to manufacture and doesn't require a pilot allows for a rapid buildup of mass or replacement of attrition. Even more so if the core control element can be ported across multiple designs and manufacturers, which seems to be what the AFRL is attempting.

More or less, yeah. No one is going to run out of maintainers or pilots, sure, but you'll hit a critical mass where it's impossible to replace losses and you never have enough to overmatch the enemy in the first engagement. Which means attrition sets in.

That means either airpower becomes irrelevant (Ukraine) or airpower vanishes against opponent aviation (ETO). Which way it goes depends on the nearness of air power parity of the opponents.

It doesn't need to be short field capable at all. Just use a Bas 90-style system where you have a main airbase, scramble from that, and then half a dozen single-squadron divert fields nearby that the maintenance and aviation wing split off to. That confounds nuclear targeting much less far less sortie efficient PGM attacks.

I assume the PRC has a similar effort underway, though I've not heard any public information released concerning such. Where as the USAF has so many separate UCAV technology programs investigating different aspects on different platforms that it is difficult to track all of them. Most of them seem like tech feeder projects outside of the CCA program, which will be the actual finished platform.

The USAF having multitudinous programs is probably indicative of a general lack of interest. If it were truly serious, it would be defining actual combat requirements, and narrow it down to one or two main combat systems. It did this with JSF and ATF. That it can't do it with drones is...interesting.

I'd guess it's trying to merge manned and robotic systems so it can try to have its cake and eat it too, though. A fully unmanned autonomous system is probably too adventurous for most air forces, PRC included, and a fully manned system is demographically unsustainable. The best middle-of-the-road option is optional manning.
 
I'd guess [the USAF is] trying to merge manned and robotic systems so it can try to have its cake and eat it too, though. A fully unmanned autonomous system is probably too adventurous for most air forces, PRC included, and a fully manned system is demographically unsustainable. The best middle-of-the-road option is optional manning.
Yes, I think the ideal is going to be one manned plane per strike package. Manned plane +3 CCA fighters to fly air cover. 4+ CCA bombers + 1x or 2x CCA EW for the actual strike. 1x or 2x CCA Recon to fly point and do BDA. Though it's possible that the manned plane will be a 2-seater if they can't get the workload of the CCAs down low enough. It's also possible that they will send a manned fighter in with the CCA bombers for that extra fraction of a second shorter decision time to drop or not drop.
 
Nowhere? Pilots across the board are leaving the USAF for private airlines for a bunch of reasons, none of them easily fixed. COVID's already eviscerated Army enlistment for the next 2 years or so, since recruiters couldn't prowl high schools, and the youngest generation of Americans might be the most anti-militant generation since Vietnam.

The USAF has a shortage of specifically frontline combat fighter pilots going on twenty years now, and the airline industry in general has a dearth of them as well, except airlines can generally beat the USAF in terms of benefits. Which is how they got a record hiring year this year, and the USAF is a record low. Less work, more pay, that always wins. That's why the USAF doesn't hurt for Globemaster or Galaxy drivers, for that matter: it's a job that easily translates to the civil field...

It also doesn't lack for B-2 drivers, either, because strategic bombers are cool.

It's getting to the point where the USAF is going to have to offer direct commissions to fly aircraft. There's always the option of training qualified NCOs as pilots, but that's not something the USAF is or was historically prepared to do, and AFAIK only the Imperial Japanese did that. The USAF tried that with drone pilots and immediately nuked it because the fighter pilot corpus complained.

Eventually something will have to give, either the quantity of manned aircraft will need to decrease, or the number of combat squadrons. The USAF simply seems too heavily wedded to manned aircraft to seriously consider unmanned combat systems, so it will probably just continue declining in pilot quantity, and quality (i.e. shifting heavy drivers to fighter squadrons), as it competes with an ever more cutthroat airline industry's better hiring practices.

Part of this is due to a lack of pilot schools, which is what caused the initial 2,000 pilot shortfall back in FY99 that has dogged the USAF for every year since, but that has been resolved for a number of years now. It's just a demographic game these days.

It will likely go into the next world war without enough pilots, which is rather unprecedented in American history. Alternatively, it will simply go to the next war without enough planes, which has some precedent, except back then the US Army could expect new aircraft on a roughly 4 month schedule (more or less, P-39 might be closer to 6 months from prototype to entry into production) instead of more modern ~400 month schedule.

I'm no expert on sociology but it seems ridiculous if we can't find the number of fighter pilots needed in a society of 330+ million people when we put far greater numbers of pilots in the skies when we had a significantly smaller population in the past. Airline pay and accommodations can't be all that perfect where nobody wants to fly anything else.
 
Yes, I think the ideal is going to be one manned plane per strike package. Manned plane +3 CCA fighters to fly air cover. 4+ CCA bombers + 1x or 2x CCA EW for the actual strike. 1x or 2x CCA Recon to fly point and do BDA. Though it's possible that the manned plane will be a 2-seater if they can't get the workload of the CCAs down low enough. It's also possible that they will send a manned fighter in with the CCA bombers for that extra fraction of a second shorter decision time to drop or not drop.

The ideal is however many aircraft can be controlled by one person. With highly automated AI this is probably around two or three. Without it, maybe one or two. If the pilot has to both fly his strike aircraft/fighter and tell the robot what to do, then it's closer to zero. This is what was found with drone operation in Afghanistan with Apache crews, at least.

The autonomous methods of loyal wingmen are pretty doable, it just requires breaking the idea of man-in-the-loop, and accepting that robots should be allowed to make mistakes in bombing targets. Any good autonomous aircraft will necessarily make similar or identical mistakes as a human, because there's something innate about fuzzy logic and error production, so it sort of comes with the territory.

Advanced strategic bombers like the B-21 can basically fly themselves, though, so they only really require weapons/sensor operators. Cutting out the human operator there probably won't save much money, but it will certainly free up a major bottleneck of needing to find pilots, and means that extraneous things like CSAR can be heavily reduced.

For frontline aircraft like intruders/fighter-bombers, fully automatic systems are ideal. It frees scarce pilots for the DCA and BARCAP mission.

I'm no expert on sociology but it seems ridiculous if we can't find the number of fighter pilots needed in a society of 330+ million people

Part of that problem is that 330+ million figure is broadly middle aged people. It's not young kids who have dreams of being fighter pilots, at least not anymore. The average American in 1880 was about 15 years younger than the average American today, and the average one in 1930 was about a decade younger.

It's a genuinely tough cookie.

when we put far greater numbers of pilots in the skies when we had a significantly smaller population in the past.

Planes stopped being interesting? People are getting dumber? Aircraft are harder to get certified to fly? Medical concerns (eyesight) are reducing the pool of available candidates?

All reasonable explanations and all true to a degree, perhaps. There's probably more to it as well, like bad personnel management policies, general attitudes towards the military since the end of the 1990s and now the GWOT-related occupations, and lack of conscription, etc. that are all very complicated and interact with each other in ways that are beyond the control of any single agency or government branch.

America could easily find enough pilots if it just let sergeants and corporals fly aircraft, like the IJN, but that would require more flight hours, which are tough to come by if you aren't deploying anywhere. It would also require more maintainers, which is an actual personnel bleed issue, and far worse than the pilot shortages. Those same maintainers would be the first guys signing up to be fighter jocks!

Airline pay and accommodations can't be all that perfect where nobody wants to fly anything else.

Well, they certainly aren't great, as evidenced by how many pilots are on food stamps, but airlines have a much better hiring rate than the Air Force! If the Air Force is anything like the USN, then its personnel management policies are positively medieval, and it's no small wonder why people prefer working with Delta or American Airways.
 
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The ideal is however many aircraft can be controlled by one person. With highly automated AI this is probably around two or three. Without it, maybe one or two. If the pilot has to both fly his strike aircraft/fighter and tell the robot what to do, then it's closer to zero. This is what was found with drone operation in Afghanistan with Apache crews, at least.
Again, it was demonstrated over 15 years ago that you can tell a flight of 4 UCAVs to "go bomb this location" and they will choose which plane of the group has the best line to the target and which of the rest will hit other targets in the area, usually described as AA/SAM emplacements and/or radars. This was part of the Lockheed Cormorant development, where the controller of the drones was in a sub, not a plane.

About 5 years ago, they demonstrated UCAV fighters able to equal or beat the pilots training them in dogfighting.

That's also why I said that it may end up that the drone complex needs a WSO/Drone Pilot in the back seat of the NGAD.
 
Again, it was demonstrated over 15 years ago that you can tell a flight of 4 UCAVs to "go bomb this location" and they will choose which plane of the group has the best line to the target and which of the rest will hit other targets in the area, usually described as AA/SAM emplacements and/or radars. This was part of the Lockheed Cormorant development, where the controller of the drones was in a sub, not a plane.

Yeah, small wonder that a ship with a C3I setup, BLOS communications, and a CIC can control more aircraft than a single seat fighter-bomber.

That's also why I said that it may end up that the drone complex needs a WSO/Drone Pilot in the back seat of the NGAD.

You need a twin seater to use anything less than a fully autonomous strike aircraft. One man operates the drones and one man flies the plane. Highly advanced drones can be operated by timesharing and hot seating the controls. A good backseater might be able to juggle two or three robots. Less advanced ones need more babysitting by a pilot.

If you have a fully autonomous aircraft you don't need the manned component at all, though. The USAF simply made a mistake by making its entire future air force fleet nothing but single seat fighters. It will be paying for this well into the 2070's as JSF won't get a replacement before then.

Since it's all single seaters, there isn't much room for autonomous or robotic aircraft in the USAF, as it's too much of a threat to the pilot community. Which is why the USAF won't go for it.

The PLAAF and PLANAF OTOH are pretty invested in heavy twin seat twin engine fighters for drone control and weapons operation.

So is the USN.
 
Yeah, small wonder that a ship with a C3I setup, BLOS communications, and a CIC can control more aircraft than a single seat fighter-bomber.
A ship with a single seat drone control station and restricted communications because continuous communications reveals your location. And no CIC in the Ohios, even the GNs.

Very much a single drone controller telling 4 birds "go here and bomb this"

You need a twin seater to use anything less than a fully autonomous strike aircraft. One man operates the drones and one man flies the plane. Highly advanced drones can be operated by timesharing and hot seating the controls. A good backseater might be able to juggle two or three robots. Less advanced ones need more babysitting by a pilot.
"Drones Attack-2, -3, -4, and EW-1, follow Attack-1"

WSO then gives orders to Attack-1 as the lead ship in the formation.

"Drones Fighter-1, 2, 3, EW-2, and Recon-1, follow me."

You know, the same way people have been controlling sub-units in RTS games since RTS games were a thing?


If you have a fully autonomous aircraft you don't need the manned component at all, though. The USAF simply made a mistake by making its entire future air force fleet nothing but single seat fighters. It will be paying for this well into the 2070's as JSF won't get a replacement before then.

Since it's all single seaters, there isn't much room for autonomous or robotic aircraft in the USAF, as it's too much of a threat to the pilot community. Which is why the USAF won't go for it.
Yes, the USAF is stupid about their design choices, there should have been a requirement for a 2-seater for both F-22 and F-35.

Now it's looking like the F15EX and NGAD will have to be 2-seaters to handle the drones, unless/until someone does a panic-build of some 2-seat F-35A/Cs. Marines will have to suck it up and not have much CCA support for the F-35Bs, there's no space to put a second seat in the B models.
 
A ship with a single seat drone control station and restricted communications because continuous communications reveals your location. And no CIC in the Ohios, even the GNs.

Very much a single drone controller telling 4 birds "go here and bomb this"


"Drones Attack-2, -3, -4, and EW-1, follow Attack-1"

WSO then gives orders to Attack-1 as the lead ship in the formation.

"Drones Fighter-1, 2, 3, EW-2, and Recon-1, follow me."

You know, the same way people have been controlling sub-units in RTS games since RTS games were a thing?

Real life is different...

MUM-T troops in Afghanistan could scarcely command more than two drones at a time, provided the Longbow was sitting back and not engaged in action, and that was up to the gunner and pilot working together. One drone was doable if the Longbow was flying around but it could hardly do battle. No drones in combat because use of the robotic AH-6 required the full attention span of the gunner/pilot crew.

It's why the MUM-T drones were used explicitly as vanguards for detection of targets to be destroyed by the Longbows. Modern ones just use Grey Eagles that can fly in a circle and pipe the sensors back to the helicopter, because it turns out the Little Bird drone helicopter was a bad idea.

A combat fighter pilot has a much greater attention span debt than a combat helicopter pilot though. He can't simply stop and hide behind a hill while talking to a pair of drones. They need to be literally autonomous and able to conduct strike missions on their own, much like human pilots, and this will necessarily entail hitting things like civilians misidentified as combatants, or civilians identified as racially/ethnically Chinese (thus, "the enemy" and a valid target), or whatever targeting parameters the neural network discerns from a given dataset and its labels.

Drones today require essentially constant manned babysitting. Some can be trusted to fly in a straight line without getting lost. This is something a backseater would do in a better designed aircraft than JSF. It's something the pilot will need to juggle, along with everything else, in the JSF.

In practice I suspect the USAF will rely on, if it ever gets the idea of using UCAS in the first place, Air Battle Managers controlling UCAS like ordinary fighters and using them to replace the fighter-bomber job of the JSF. This would free JSFs up to do F-22's job of OCA/DCA. It would also put the least pressure on the poor single-seat fighter pilots.

That's important because the USAF is at a deficit of about 600 frontline tactical fighters aka ATF, which it hopes to make up with 1,700 JSFs and several hundred F-15/F-16, but right now it's looking like it will have a deficit of both JSFs and ATFs, and probably of F-15EX as well. Eliminating the bomb truck mission from JSF means it will be able to do ATF's job, albeit poorly. Because it's a stealth A-7, not a stealth F-15, thus it's probably not the best at maneuvering in BVR. So it goes...

If the robotic aircraft is smart enough to find targets on its own, destroy them, and return to base, it can probably be trusted to two or three per JSF, at best. If it isn't, then it's not worth much, because no JSF driver will be able to operate a drone and fly a jet at the same time, which is impossible. Which is why the robotic aircraft needs to be smart enough to kill things on its own and not be expected to wait for a man-in-the-loop decision to tell it to kill things.

That's kind of the point of a loyal wingman...

A CCA/loyal wingman isn't going to be a panacea, but it will certainly reduce the "virtual attrition" of JSF put into JDAMing/SDBing armor columns, and let them do more important things like killing enemy bombers and protecting own bombers.

If only the USAF has enough brains to make a good one and not a tiny one. UCLASS would be ideal since it can carry 8-16 SDBs per.

Unfortunately, the USAF didn't have enough brains to keep the WSO in the back of the F-22 or F-35, so it's unlikely that drone operation will be viable in a future world war outside of B-21 I guess. If it has to rely on Sentry or Joint STARS, it's doomed, because those will be killed by long range VLO aircraft. B-21 seems to be the only USAF two-seat VLO aircraft that will actually be available in less than a decade and has some built-in drone management capacity. But that's also the most modern and only actual XXI century aircraft the USAF has at the moment.

JSF and ATF are both ancient, from the Reagan-era, and would have been excellent if they had been built in the same numbers and America had the same demographic/personnel situation of the era. So they're pretty short sighted designs that didn't take into account remote UCAS/drone operation as a matter of importance for frontline fighters.

Maybe they'll bring back the robotic teammate for B-21 at some point though.
 
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Real life is different...

MUM-T troops in Afghanistan could scarcely command more than two drones at a time, provided the Longbow was sitting back and not engaged in action, and that was up to the gunner and pilot working together. One drone was doable if the Longbow was flying around but it could hardly do battle. No drones in combat because use of the robotic AH-6 required the full attention span of the gunner/pilot crew.

It's why the MUM-T drones were used explicitly as vanguards for detection of targets to be destroyed by the Longbows. Modern ones just use Grey Eagles that can fly in a circle and pipe the sensors back to the helicopter, because it turns out the Little Bird drone helicopter was a bad idea.
Right. That was a terrible implementation.

Since then we have had MQ-8 Fire Scouts and even the MQ-24 K-MAX. We also have various quadcopters that are capable of stationkeeping to their control handheld, while relaying FPV video at 4k resolution. As civilian available systems.

A combat fighter pilot has a much greater attention span debt than a combat helicopter pilot though. He can't simply stop and hide behind a hill while talking to a pair of drones. They need to be literally autonomous and able to conduct strike missions on their own, much like human pilots, and this will necessarily entail hitting things like civilians misidentified as combatants, or civilians identified as racially/ethnically Chinese (thus, "the enemy" and a valid target), or whatever targeting parameters the neural network discerns from a given dataset and its labels.

Drones today require essentially constant manned babysitting. Some can be trusted to fly in a straight line without getting lost. This is something a backseater would do in a better designed aircraft than JSF. It's something the pilot will need to juggle, along with everything else, in the JSF.
Like I said, I suspect that it will result in an Oh, Shit moment for the USAF and development of 2-seater versions of the F-35A and -C, with the Marines having to suck it up or rely on either the VFAXX or FA-18Fs or Growlers to manage the drones.

In practice I suspect the USAF will rely on, if it ever gets the idea of using UCAS in the first place, Air Battle Managers controlling UCAS like ordinary fighters and using them to replace the fighter-bomber job of the JSF. This would free JSFs up to do F-22's job of OCA/DCA. It would also put the least pressure on the poor single-seat fighter pilots.

That's important because the USAF is at a deficit of about 600 frontline tactical fighters aka ATF, which it hopes to make up with 1,700 JSFs and several hundred F-15/F-16, but right now it's looking like it will have a deficit of both JSFs and ATFs, and probably of F-15EX as well. Eliminating the bomb truck mission from JSF means it will be able to do ATF's job, albeit poorly. Because it's a stealth A-7, not a stealth F-15, thus it's probably not the best at maneuvering in BVR. So it goes...

If the robotic aircraft is smart enough to find targets on its own, destroy them, and return to base, it can probably be trusted to two or three per JSF, at best. If it isn't, then it's not worth much, because no JSF driver will be able to operate a drone and fly a jet at the same time, which is impossible. Which is why the robotic aircraft needs to be smart enough to kill things on its own and not be expected to wait for a man-in-the-loop decision to tell it to kill things.

That's kind of the point of a loyal wingman...

A CCA/loyal wingman isn't going to be a panacea, but it will certainly reduce the "virtual attrition" of JSF put into JDAMing/SDBing armor columns, and let them do more important things like killing enemy bombers and protecting own bombers.
The drones need to get to the point of needing as much pilot interaction as arming and dropping a JDAM. "Select weapon/drone, select target coordinates, wait for light to go green or whatever the "target locked" indicator is for the JDAMs, pull trigger."

If the drones are something that has the same rough range as the F-22/F-35/NGAD, the pilot can do a lot of the prep work on the ground. Pre-defining groups between "escort" and "strike", setting up the recon bird(s) to automatically fly the bomb damage assessment run about 25-50mi behind the strike package to give any secondary explosions time to settle, etc. Basically a bigger pre-flight.

Maybe they'll bring back the robotic teammate for B-21 at some point though.
That I doubt, the cockpit doesn't make as much of a % of the total load in a plane that size, and I don't think anyone is comfortable with the idea of a nuclear armed drone.

Could definitely see the B-21 acting as the quarterback for the smaller drones we have mooted for the CCA program. As is, the F-15EX is the likely quarterback for the job until the two-seat F-35s show up.

Though I need to add that right now, the proposed drones are a missile truck, an EW platform, and a recon unit. No bomb truck proposed so far, and I have no clue why.
 
Yeah, small wonder that a ship with a C3I setup, BLOS communications, and a CIC can control more aircraft than a single seat fighter-bomber.



You need a twin seater to use anything less than a fully autonomous strike aircraft. One man operates the drones and one man flies the plane. Highly advanced drones can be operated by timesharing and hot seating the controls. A good backseater might be able to juggle two or three robots. Less advanced ones need more babysitting by a pilot.

If you have a fully autonomous aircraft you don't need the manned component at all, though. The USAF simply made a mistake by making its entire future air force fleet nothing but single seat fighters. It will be paying for this well into the 2070's as JSF won't get a replacement before then.

Since it's all single seaters, there isn't much room for autonomous or robotic aircraft in the USAF, as it's too much of a threat to the pilot community. Which is why the USAF won't go for it.

The PLAAF and PLANAF OTOH are pretty invested in heavy twin seat twin engine fighters for drone control and weapons operation.

So is the USN.

The F-15E/EX fleet are two seaters, as is the B-21. IMO the B-21 is a natural platform to base CCAs off of until the manned NGAD becomes available. This would probably preclude it from bombing targets, but on the other hand it likely is A2A capable with extreme endurance and probably the best airborne sensor system available. Something like an air launched SM-6 would give it stand off range, in addition to the CCA weapons.

I don't think USAF is intending for its CCA force to be as hands on as you describe in any case. I suspect the remote operator will be able to select a ROE and behavior type - ie, wingman, decoy, offensive air sweep, stand in jammer, etc. For the moment it also seems like the operator will have to approve any weapons fire, though permission could perhaps be implicit with behavior selection or otherwise be provided ahead of time. Given sufficient automation, the operator wouldn't have to even be local - missiles like Tomahawk and LRASM have two way satellite coms that enable them to be retargeted or otherwise be given new instructions, as well as share their target information with a shore base. Relying on a satellite link would open a lot of vulnerabilities, but it could be a back up mode of operation if conditions allow.
 
Maybe one of you should create an

“endless and mostly useless speculation” thread and have this a more “news only” thread.
Also 'Merica should just surrender now, who knew the Imperial Japanese Navy would be able to teach us a thing or two.

Apparently America has no pilots, cant build or program drones, built the wrong aircraft, etc etc. Makes me ashamed to be in NATO with them.
 
The F-15E/EX fleet are two seaters, as is the B-21. IMO the B-21 is a natural platform to base CCAs off of until the manned NGAD becomes available.

The problem is that everyone, both in the PRC and US, are expecting a war in about 48 months, give or take half a year, more or less. CCAs only exist in the PRC because they've been converting old aircraft to UCAVs for the past decade, probably because they've been seriously preparing to fight another world war:


The US could've done this if it'd bothered to field QF-16s or something as combat platforms, back in 2015, when DARPA talked about it. If the USAF really gets its keister in gear it might be able to push out robotic A-10s in a couple years and put the Hog pilots into JSFs instead, which would give you something like 200-300 more tactical fighter drivers to warm seats.

But yeah the F-15E/-EX are going to be worked hard. I just don't think the USAF is bringing much to the table on the joint fight in a potential Taiwan showdown, aside from the B-2s and B-52s, which are always helpful, and the F-22s which might be helpful (they've demonstrated austere operations in Japan). It'll be retiring a huge number of useful combat aircraft between now and 2028, and on-boarding a bunch of light single-seat bombers instead, while the USN will muddle through with twin seaters as usual, but the twin seaters might end up being more useful.

I suspect it's going to be a inverse of Desert Storm: The USAF shows up, gets clowned on by the Navy, and then spends the next 20 years wallowing in despair. Meanwhile, the USN will get to NGAD first and the Air Force might get a landized version of the naval NGAD.
 
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If you assume a conflict is inevitable in the next several years, then fighter development from either side hardly matters. It will be a ‘come as you are’ conflict. I personally don’t think such a move works well for the PRC and the US has no reason to overturn the apple cart. So I think peacetime fighter development carries on as normal.
 
Meanwhile, the USN will get to NGAD first and the Air Force might get a landized version of the naval NGAD.
If both services are going to end up using the same airframe, the USAF using the Navy design is the way to do it. USAF gets a tougher airframe that's a bit heavier than they want, but it's cheaper because the total buy isn't 200 airframes but more like 750 between AF and Navy needs. Assuming a 1:1 replacement of Super Hornets, anyways.
 
Only an act of Congress will make the USAF adopt a USN fighter. Given the very different needs of the two organizations I think the two separate programs go on as they are now.
 
Whoever looses the USAF NGAD may well win the US Navy's FA-XX program, so we may find ourselves with totally different fighters for the two services born out of different requirements.
 
Lemme guess - Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
 
Something like that Arjen, though I still wonder if Boeing is still in the running for the US Navy FA-XX contract. We have heard next to nothing about that program.
 
Whoever looses the USAF NGAD may well win the US Navy's FA-XX program, so we may find ourselves with totally different fighters for the two services born out of different requirements.
I hope that's the case. I've seen at least one politician pushing for a TFX part 2.
 
Oh Help! Let's see if they can remember what happened first time round with the F-111A/B the F-111B ended up far too heavy and did not meet the US Navy's requirements at that time, so I would think that who ever suggested that they go down that route again should take a long hard look at the history books. :mad:
 
(cough) F-4 Phantom II (cough) . . .
Also, the A-7 'SLUF' would like a word . . .

cheers,
Robin.
 
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Oh Help! Let's see if they can remember what happened first time round with the F-111A/B the F-111B ended up far too heavy and did not meet the US Navy's requirements at that time, so I would think that who ever suggested that they go down that route again should take a long hard look at the history books. :mad:
The F-111B actually met the original USN requirements.
But the USN later decided they'd rather have an actual fighter.
That's the story afaik.
 
The F-111B actually met the original USN requirements.
But the USN later decided they'd rather have an actual fighter.
That's the story afaik.
And in fact, the loaded F-14D came close to the weight of the F-111B. The USN also switched because whenever it came down to an argument over what the USN wanted vs what the USAF wanted for the TFX, the USAF almost always won the argument. It was the USAF's choices that drove the weight up to begin with; such as the side by side seating and high flotation landing gear.
 
And in fact, the loaded F-14D came close to the weight of the F-111B. The USN also switched because whenever it came down to an argument over what the USN wanted vs what the USAF wanted for the TFX, the USAF almost always won the argument. It was the USAF's choices that drove the weight up to begin with; such as the side by side seating and high flotation landing gear.
The F-14D also had engines 50% more powerful than the utterly anemic TF-30s.
 
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BREAKING NEWS!! SECRETIVE SIXTH GENERATION PROTOTYPE REVEALED

Taking advantage of breakthrough advances developed in the black world in the last 30 years, one of the main features of the new fighter is the ability to be entirely 3D printed almost instantaneously, potentially enabling the production of large volumes of fighters during a hypothetical conflict. A lifting body arrowhead shape was found to be the most effective design balancing cost, stealth, maneuverability, range and other attributes, while maximizing internal volume available for fuel and payload. The aircraft makes use of active flow control and fluidic thrust vectoring, limiting the number of control surfaces required to only four. Also, the lack of a visible nozzle indicates it employs a novel exhaust system that greatly reduces the IR signature of the engine(RIVET). The technologies inside this airframe are so advanced that it even, although in a limited way, employs antigravity tech, to maneuver while on the ground, removing the need for landing gear wheels.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqskhTNwYlQ&t=5s

(Everything I've written above is not intended to be taken seriously)
 

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What was the original Link Plumeria program since it has been around for 30 years quellish? I would have thought that the US Navy would try to think up a new name for the FA-XX instead.
 
Huh? Link Plumeria has been around for like 30 years.
Maybe it's the standard "let's hide the money here" R&D line item that emits a production program from time to time.
 
Paywalled article by Steve Trimble. TL;DR: FA/XX SAP codename is Link Plumeria, and it's the fourth biggest R&D line item behind the LGM-35, USAF NGAD, and OPIR.


Not exactly news, is it? The Drive had an article linking the two back in March, based on the investigative research technique of reading the FY24 budget request. But The Drive was a bit clearer, I think, that FA-XX and the Link Plumeria SAP are two separate budget lines within PE0603748N that previously held just the SAP:


Based on the other budget moves involving LP, it's obviously related to advanced aircraft developments, but it's been around too long to just be another name for FA-XX.

As to why FA-XX and LP are in the same PE now, I'd guess it's because it's easier to use the same cleared budget analysts than to create a new team just for FA-XX at this point.
 

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