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

doggedman said:
I don't know and You may be correct. But I would think that if you were correct, it would be a different vehicle. If the engine contracts were issued to Pratt and GE in 2016, it's just my view, but I doubt that funding level is sufficient to pay for engines plus flight test.
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That's my question; What powered it? Were they new power plants? Or is it a demonstrator, possibly using F-119s or F-135s until the new power plants are available?
The new three stream engines are going to be testing the first "operational" configuration of the engines next year.

Also, I think whatever was flown wasn't a development of an existing design. If it was that similar there wouldn't be a need to keep it's configuration secret. I think it's a completely new design that takes advantage of the all of the advanced manufacturing techniques developed over the past two decades.
 
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Sundog said:
doggedman said:
I don't know and You may be correct. But I would think that if you were correct, it would be a different vehicle. If the engine contracts were issued to Pratt and GE in 2016, it's just my view, but I doubt that funding level is sufficient to pay for engines plus flight test.
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That's my question; What powered it? Were they new power plants? Or is it a demonstrator, possibly using F-119s or F-135s until the new power plants are available?
The new three stream engines are going to be testing the first "operational" configuration of the engines next year.

Also, I think whatever was flown wasn't a development of an existing design. If it was that similar there wouldn't be a need to keep it's configuration secret. I think it's a completely new design that takes advantage of the all of the advanced manufacturing techniques developed over the past two decades.
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Per the budget, I don't think they are even ready to start NGAP airframe integration until 2022.
It overlaps with the AETP (on F-35) assessment.
 
Not including related program funding, they have in excess of $1B next year. Seems to me more than sufficient funding given nearly $1B last FY. I agree, this isn't an existing design and I also think you are correct about manufacturing. BA's Black Diamond program has a number of technologies that could be applicable.
 
AeroFranz said:
NUSNA_Moebius said:
Whose to say the demonstrator isn't just a modified F-35 or F-22? Also, just because the airframe has flown, it doesn't mean it's packed with all the electronic 6th gen goodness.
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My thoughts exactly. You could take a fifth-gen platform and stuff it with sixth-gen systems, maybe even powerplant, and technically claim it's a 'new' demonstrator because the system is more than the just the platform that happens to move your sensors and weapons around...i know, a bit convoluted but honestly i have a hard time a demonstrator of the relevant scale has been designed, built, and flown without anyone noticing things like surges of hiring at one of the primes. Usually there's telltales of these things.

That being said, if there is a brand new X-plane, i'm going to be stoked! :D
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Your assuming that there haven't been previous black programs and those now idle engineers were not repurposed for this. There are a lot of ways to hide engineers being on a companies payroll.

I have a hard swallowing a f22 or f35 being called a demonstrator for ngad. What exactly would it be demonstrating? Unless the engine is a direct drop in.the f22is too rare to use. For that matter why not use a f15 airframe if you're going down the path of it demonstrating new avionics? But the USA already has a repurposed airliner it used when working on the avionics/radar for the 35. Obviously they could just use that as well.

As suspected the black world, thank god, is alive and well with god knows what else hidden away. What do you think happens at a base in the middle of a mountain range with thousands of people there? They're not just flying flankers and fulcrums.

I suspect the deomstrator was demonstrating materials and aero/stealth integration along with verifying weapons release. Something in between the more refined yf22 and the more science project yf23.

Making the demonstrator unmanned would be needlessly $$$.

The only thing more exciting would be hearing in a news release that initial productio begins in 2years.now that would be amazing for our side.

There are no photos of the alleged "sr72" sighting from 2 years ago.
 
marauder2048 said:
Or the demonstrator could be demonstrating how quickly and with what degree of fidelity
the design and fabrication tools permit you to fly a (presumably unmanned) fighter with a novel planform.
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That would be something implicit in whatever they built. I am an automotive engineer and manufacturing and materials selection and tooling begin with the first "napkin" sketches we get from the studio. When I think of our capabilities in white world automotive design I can only ponder how much more is done in high perofromance military aircraft engineering.

Wasnt bird of prey less an experiment in stealth than in manufacturing ? Or am I recalling that Boeing project wrong?
 
rooster said:
marauder2048 said:
Or the demonstrator could be demonstrating how quickly and with what degree of fidelity
the design and fabrication tools permit you to fly a (presumably unmanned) fighter with a novel planform.
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That would be something implicit in whatever they built. I am an automotive engineer and manufacturing and materials selection and tooling begin with the first "napkin" sketches we get from the studio. When I think of our capabilities in white world automotive design I can only ponder how much more is done in high perofromance military aircraft engineering.

Wasnt bird of prey less an experiment in stealth than in manufacturing ? Or am I recalling that Boeing project wrong?
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AFAIK, no tailless aircraft has flown supersonically in the flight regimes of interest to fighter aircraft.
If say Lockheed built this demonstrator on the basis of ICE and submitted both the flight perf predictions from
their tools and then went out and readily confirmed those predictions with test points that's a hugely successful demonstrator.
 
marauder2048 said:
Or the demonstrator could be demonstrating how quickly and with what degree of fidelity
the design and fabrication tools permit you to fly a (presumably unmanned) fighter with a novel planform.
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Hypothetically, like Bird Of Prey it could have demonstrated the new rapid design, prototyping, and fabrication technologies that are being talked about as enablers for the "new century series". And the program could have been well under way or finished when those "century series" statements were made in public.
 
BDF said:
dark sidius said:
With the Billions of black programs it won't be difficult to build demonstrators in secrecy.
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Thing is is I believe most black funding is spread out over many much more mundane programs. In any case I'm stoked to hear that we have at least some hardware in testing and its currently black. Granted we have no idea how actually sophisticated it is and could be nothing but a simple airframe. I've been skeptical (and remain so) of the digital century series but I'm starting to warm to it.
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That is correct. The bulk of the AF classified programs funding is a couple of large programs that are "mundane" - NRO, continuity of government, strategic war planning and support. Those programs are a very large amount of money but not very glamorous.
 
bobbymike said:
Could you build a “Bird of Prey” type system to test a prospective NGAD design?
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Sure. Being able to quickly get a high fidelity, full scale prototype means you could probably put together
a good sized test fleet reasonably quickly and cheaply; there are probably a lot of test points to cover for
whatever they want demonstrated.
quellish said:
marauder2048 said:
Or the demonstrator could be demonstrating how quickly and with what degree of fidelity
the design and fabrication tools permit you to fly a (presumably unmanned) fighter with a novel planform.
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Hypothetically, like Bird Of Prey it could have demonstrated the new rapid design, prototyping, and fabrication technologies that are being talked about as enablers for the "new century series". And the program could have been well under way or finished when those "century series" statements were made in public.
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Makes sense. My intuition is that you only do a full scale demonstrator if there are..well...scalability questions surrounding the tech.

Example: you couldn't convincingly retire risk on LO propulsion tolerance of hot gas ingestion from missile exhaust without doing
missile launches from the internal weapons bay of a scale demonstrator @ speed/altitude.
 
I can see 2 new technologies for NGAD that would need a specific demonstrator:

1. Supersonic tailless airframe
2. New 3rd stream engines

A new engine can be tested on a F-15 / F-16 testbed, but that would count as a demonstrator. The supersonic tailless airframe concept has to be tested somehow and this would be the perfect chance to test "digital century series" design concepts while retiring the aerodynamic risk of that configuration.
 
As per the Defense News article posted earlier:

The importance, Roper said, is that just a year after the service completed an analysis of alternatives, the Air Force has proven it can use cutting-edge advanced manufacturing techniques to build and test a virtual version of its next fighter — and then move to constructing a full-scale prototype and flying it with mission systems onboard.
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“We’re going after the most complicated systems that have ever been built, and checked all the boxes with this digital technology. In fact, [we’ve] not just checked the boxes, [we’ve] demonstrated something that’s truly magical.”
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Personally it sounds to me like they flew a new airframe with some kind of mission systems suite. Personally I expect that the airframe is brand-new, the engines are either stock F135s, or modified F135s (akin to how the X-35 / X-32 used modified F119s) and the mission systems are probably a combination of new avionics and probably just some MOTS sensors. Being a tech demonstrator there'd certainly be some planned systems omitted; I could see the radar being omitted for an air data probe and instrumentation hardware for example, but it might have an early version of the EW / ESM suite installed for example.
 
Dragon029 said:
The importance, Roper said, is that just a year after the service completed an analysis of alternatives, the Air Force has proven it can use cutting-edge advanced manufacturing techniques to build and test a virtual version of its next fighter — and then move to constructing a full-scale prototype and flying it with mission systems onboard.
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That's a great point; the issue with the CATBIRD and other surrogates is that they can't come close to replicating
the flight envelope and concomitant hostile environment (say thermals) where these systems have to operate.
 
sublight is back said:
“We’ve already built and flown a full-scale flight demonstrator in the real world, and we broke records in doing it”
If this is true, then they are certainly in "not fucking around" mode.
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Yeah, I'll bet the "records" are something like, "less rework than ever before in an experimental aircraft". It won't be a performance parameter, or anything actually interesting. (If it's anything like NASA announcements anyway. . .)
 
Sounds something akin to the X-32 ad X-35 but with more of the intended electronics in it. I'd be amazed if had the full suite of mission systems already, unless there is a fair bit of adapted off-the-shelf stuff.
I get cynical about these press releases, the "records" are probably quite mundane. "Ever before" would seem a bold statement, most Great War era types were knocked up off the drawing board and in frontline hands within months. Even reading today about some de Havilland's inter-war civil aircraft, two months from first flight to customer delivery. The kind of timescales the modern industry could only dream about.

Is the subtext here that there will be no fly-off? That the eF-36 or whatever it becomes is already a done deal? If I was a better man I would say its another LM product (Boeing got TX, NG got B-21).
 
Do you realize that back then planes were mostly empty shells, test pilot attrition rate was horrendous and most in-service airframe kept crashing for years before every bugs were fixed?
 
Hood said:
The kind of timescales the modern industry could only dream about.
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Light years difference in complexity. Compare the construction of a composite part with laying out and banging out a piece of sheet metal.
 
TomcatViP said:
Do you realize that back then planes were mostly empty shells, test pilot attrition rate was horrendous and most in-service airframe kept crashing for years before every bugs were fixed?
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The point still stands, he said "ever before", not "within the last 20 years."
Of course there is a big difference, I'm just pointing out the historical context with tongue in cheek.
 
sferrin said:
You wouldn't think that one would even be difficult. Slap a Harpoon seeker on ATACMs and call it good. (Yes, I know it;s more complicated than that, but all your lego pieces already exist.)
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I think you'd need a very different seeker than just re-purposing the Harpoon radar. When they were looking at the RGM-66F active radar antiship missile (c. 1973), the seeker was dramatically different from Harpoon -- basically a side-looking radar with some sophisticated processing to pull ship signatures out of heavy sea clutter thanks to the high grazing angle approach. Today you'd likely be better off adapting the AMRAAM seeker as modified for SM-6, since it is already set up to fly the same basic profile in SM-6's antiship mode. JAGM similarly is set up to find targets in heavy clutter from a high-angle approach, but probably a lot cheaper than AMRAAM.
 
TomS said:
sferrin said:
You wouldn't think that one would even be difficult. Slap a Harpoon seeker on ATACMs and call it good. (Yes, I know it;s more complicated than that, but all your lego pieces already exist.)
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I think you'd need a very different seeker than just re-purposing the Harpoon radar. When they were looking at the RGM-66F active radar antiship missile (c. 1973), the seeker was dramatically different from Harpoon -- basically a side-looking radar with some sophisticated processing to pull ship signatures out of heavy sea clutter thanks to the high grazing angle approach. Today you'd likely be better off adapting the AMRAAM seeker as modified for SM-6, since it is already set up to fly the same basic profile in SM-6's antiship mode. JAGM similarly is set up to find targets in heavy clutter from a high-angle approach, but probably a lot cheaper than AMRAAM.
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Right, but both the JAGM and SM-6 seekers already exist, which is my point. The pieces are off the shelf, you're just repackaging them.
 
It occurs to me the other route they could go besides off the shelf drone designs scaled up is an F-35 with a more aerodynamic fuselage. The F-35 doesn't follow the area rule well, which I think is mostly due to the conflicting requirements of fuel for range and length to fit on a gator freighter elevator. If you stretched the fuselage you probably could get much better acceleration, cruise, and top speed out of it and keep the existing engine, avionics, and most importantly code, with the exception of the flight control software.

Though that wouldn't really be a "technology demonstrator", so I still think an unmanned platform is much more likely.
 
Josh_TN said:
It occurs to me the other route they could go besides off the shelf drone designs scaled up is an F-35 with a more aerodynamic fuselage. The F-35 doesn't follow the area rule well, which I
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Any change in design requires a long drawn process of certification and testing, not to say unique line parts which add to maintenance costs.
As such, the best way is what roper describes, keeping most of the subsystems the same, and changing one at a time with variable designs all being virtually modified through digital twinning.
 
Josh_TN said:
It occurs to me the other route they could go besides off the shelf drone designs scaled up is an F-35 with a more aerodynamic fuselage. The F-35 doesn't follow the area rule well, which I think is mostly due to the conflicting requirements of fuel for range and length to fit on a gator freighter elevator. If you stretched the fuselage you probably could get much better acceleration, cruise, and top speed out of it and keep the existing engine, avionics, and most importantly code, with the exception of the flight control software.

Though that wouldn't really be a "technology demonstrator", so I still think an unmanned platform is much more likely.
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I like this idea - also fairly easy to hide it within a flight of normal F35, so yes it may well have 'flown' - whatever that means....
 
Josh_TN said:
It occurs to me the other route they could go besides off the shelf drone designs scaled up is an F-35 with a more aerodynamic fuselage. The F-35 doesn't follow the area rule well, which I think is mostly due to the conflicting requirements of fuel for range and length to fit on a gator freighter elevator. If you stretched the fuselage you probably could get much better acceleration, cruise, and top speed out of it and keep the existing engine, avionics, and most importantly code, with the exception of the flight control software.

Though that wouldn't really be a "technology demonstrator", so I still think an unmanned platform is much more likely.
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If we can have a wish list:

massive 'F-35' - twin engined?
Large internal weapons or fuel bay.
Good for strike and AD.
2 seats? One to fly, one to be 'network centric'?
Because the Pacific isn't shrinking....
Toilet?
 
Can't imagine why you'd be so secretive about an F-35 fuselage plug.
And there are all sorts of contractual (e.g. data rights) and certification issues this would run into.
 
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DrRansom said:
I can see 2 new technologies for NGAD that would need a specific demonstrator:

1. Supersonic tailless airframe
2. New 3rd stream engines

A new engine can be tested on a F-15 / F-16 testbed, but that would count as a demonstrator. The supersonic tailless airframe concept has to be tested somehow and this would be the perfect chance to test "digital century series" design concepts while retiring the aerodynamic risk of that configuration.
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3. Advanced Flight Controls (Separate from the tailless issue); "wing warping/hinge less" flight controls. Or the porous flight control systems, etc.
 

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