NGAD Win Puts Boeing Back in the Game With The F-47
22:30 Share

Welcome to this emergency CzechSix podcast, Scramble the F-47 Edition, where we discuss the White House announcement that Boeing will build the US Air Force's next-generation air dominance fighter. As you all know, the Air Force was going to award the contract last year, then once Simba White called on the idea and the Biden administration left it to the Trump administration to decide the way forward. Well, after some heavy lobbying by the Air Force and industry, we have a winner.

Boeing. With me to discuss what it all means, still somewhat buzzing from the jet fumes of the announcement, are Aviation Week's Senior Defense Editor Steve Trimble and Matt Juppie, our Senior Analyst for Military Programs. I'm Robert Wall, Aviation Week's Executive Editor for Defense and Space, and your host for today. And I've not been this excited about a fighter announcement, well, since the last one, when Lockheed beat Boeing for the Joint Strike Fighter Program. So Steve, why don't you tell our audience what you think it all means?

Yes. Now I remember that was October 26, 2001, I think, for the F-35. And now we have March 21st, 2025 for the F-47. F-47. Yes. Yes. And we'll find out what its nickname is probably in a few years.

But yeah, boy, this is huge and kind of unexpected, I think it's fair to say. Starting the week, we certainly had no idea this was going to happen. Started getting some hints and some rumblings yesterday evening that something was afoot and could come out today. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened. And this means that, yeah, Boeing is going to develop this new fighter for the Air Force. I say fighter in loose terms because, you know,

you know, sort of a tactical combat aircraft is probably the best way of saying it. I think when we finally see the full breadth of it, it will challenge our sort of traditional definition of what a fighter is supposed to look like and what it does. But that means that Lockheed Martin lost the competition.

You know, they still got the F-35. Its future with the U.S. program of record is still a little bit uncertain until we see the first budget submitted by this version of the Trump administration. That's supposed to come out in a couple of months. But in the meantime, you know, Boeing's got this new fighter development program. They've been preparing for it and spending a lot of money on the infrastructure for this.

I went out to St. Louis last June and saw this construction site of this $1.8 billion investment they were making in a new advanced combat aircraft production facility that was going to produce this aircraft. They couldn't say that explicitly, but it was pretty clear that that was the opportunity that they were pursuing.

This is a huge thing for Boeing, right? I mean, their defense and space business have really been struggling. I think it's fair to say they reported over $18 billion in reach forward losses on the five fixed price development programs that they signed up for in the previous decade.

And that's really hurt them. They've also had severe execution problems with Air Force One, with T-7, with MQ-25, obviously with commercial crew and a lot of other things. So this program allows them to kind of start with a clean slate and take some of those digital engineering practices that they've

been struggling to implement successfully on the T-7 and MQ-25 and sort of extrapolate that on this clean sheet of paper with the lessons learned they already have. So if you want to take sort of the positive or the optimistic outlook for this, this is a chance for them to kind of redeem themselves with the kind of investment from the Air Force that can really make a difference.

So kind of cement themselves in the fighter business for potentially for decades to come, right? Because the F-15EX is a sweet airplane, but, you know, it also doesn't have probably a lot of production life, at least. No, and really ever since that moment in October of 2001, when the X-32 lost, the question has always hovered over St. Louis, like how long can they keep this going? I think if you would imagine

had asked people in St. Louis, the employees there in 2009 or 2010, if they thought they were still going to have an F-15 and F-18 line still active in 2025, they would have looked at you pretty funny. But sure enough, I mean, Boeing was able to sustain F-18EF through new buys from the U.S. Navy. And for the F-15, they were able to keep, you know, sort of

incrementally modernize it through the Saudi order, which added fly-by-wire, a couple other things, and the Qatari order, which added this new cockpit station. And now with the F-15EX, they're adding a new electronic warfare system that's also going in the F-15E. So they've been able to keep that going, but really the clock was ticking on both those programs. We know the Super Hornet is shutting down in a couple of years. F-15EX, we just don't know how much farther that can go.

But now they've got this new aircraft that they can build. There's still a Navy competition, by the way. I mean, that's still sort of out there. That's the F-AXX, and Boeing is definitely still in competition for that with Northrop Grumman. We found out Lockheed Martin has dropped out of that competition, but it's still very much in competition. Where it stands now after this INGAD order, we're not really sure. I would have thought that that might have actually gone to a contract award first,

But I guess the Air Force was able to jump ahead of the queue or sort of reassert its place in the line because they put their program on hold for nine months to do this big review that concluded that, in fact, everything that they had originally assumed and thought about this aircraft is exactly correct. So they went on this very sort of circuitous loop for nine months to wind up where we are.

So that's the big thing I think on the industrial side is a huge opportunity for Boeing. But it also means they got to get this right. You know, they cannot afford to go through what they've been through on those other programs. They have a different CEO and a different leadership structure in place now. So hopefully this is the opportunity for them to redeem themselves, get their feet back, have this huge investment now in their engineering and their digital infrastructure.

engineering and manufacturing capabilities that maybe they can even apply on a commercial side. That's kind of beyond the scope of this podcast, but I'm just, it's really significant for Boeing. Yeah. So, so that's going on, but then of course we've got a new aircraft too, and we even got a little bit of a peek at it. They showed just a hint of its outer mold line, especially the forward fuselage, bit of the wing and the nose landing gear, which was quite exciting if you're into that kind of thing.

And it's very much not the ugly duckling that the X-32 was, since you did mention that airplane. We don't know that yet. I have to reserve judgment until I see the rest of the aircraft. I still haven't seen the inlets. And remember, the inlet on the X-32 was really the biggest problem with that thing.

Man, I have a personal hatred of dorsal inlets, top-mounted inlets. I just don't like them. I don't like to see them on aircraft. I know why they put them there and why sometimes it's really important, but I prefer, especially with a fighter, that they're not on it. It's one of the reasons why I hate the J-36 that China unveiled back in December.

So, but I am interested in what Matt Juby thinks about what we saw today. Absolutely. This little glimpse, this sliver of what this aircraft looks like. And what'd you take away from it, Matt?

Well, Steve and I were trying to discuss, you know, possible features. And I mean, you can see some very typical stealth features, very prominent shine line, plan form alignment between the nose and the wings, curved fuselage there. And perhaps, you know, given the limited, intentionally limited picture there that's not showing key features like...

The intake design, the rear quarter engine views and such, perhaps looking at its heritage is a way to infer some details. And so Boeing really started to get into low observables in the 1980s. And this would really mark the first proper Boeing LO platform to enter U.S. service in a production configuration.

Boeing has a very long distinguished history of demonstrators and concepts, but this would really mark a first and kind of a key figure in that capability configuration journey is Alan Weichman, who helped with Berta Prey, the X-36, reportedly also with the Next Generation Bomber demonstrator, which flew in the 2000s. And so it'll be interesting to see if some of his legacy may indeed add it up on this platform.

Well, the thing that struck me also was that radio, you know, the nose. What did you see there?

It does have a very interesting nose that kind of reminds me a little bit of the X-36, a little bit of some of the Northrop YF-23 kind of earlier configuration platypus nose type arrangement. But it's obviously intentionally difficult to see at this point. Barter details. Also, the canopy is quite large on the image.

What should we read into the radome shaping? Do you think it's a sign of a fairly sizable array that it's masking? Well, so that's the interesting thing about it. So obviously what you want, all fighters up until now, or maybe even now as well, are shaped by that radar that goes in the front of the aircraft. And you want to make that radome as big as possible.

This radome is even bigger and it's wider. It's like twice the width proportionately that you would expect. These are very general numbers and just sort of a feel for it, but it does give you incredible space in that radome for an array that I would imagine would be multifunctional. So not just a radar or an array for just doing what a radar does, but also for communications, for jamming, for electronic warfare.

But the big surprise for me with that was that I know we're going to gallium nitride semiconductors now. So, you know, previous radars and active electronically scanned arrays like you'd see on an aircraft like this have all had gallium arsenide in the past. And the shift to gallium nitride gives you so much more power throughput and temperature capacity, thermal capacity on those arrays. So you can get so much more energy out of the same space, right?

And I thought that that was going to open up the design space for an aircraft like NGAD, where you could distribute the array around the aircraft. You could have smaller arrays, but still get the same amount of power. And you could have them in different places. Maybe they're still doing that, but it's still amazing to see what could be this real estate for this massive array right at the front of the aircraft.

Again, it's very speculative and I don't know what's inside that radome. Who knows what's inside? So, but if you look at, you know, just the way we do these things in the past and if that's going forward, that's a lot of real estate for a big array, radio frequency type array.

The other thing that really, I mean, so when you think about what they want to do with the next generation air dominance fighter, they want to penetrate airspace, heavily contested airspace that's very, very far away, right? So they are trying to make this aircraft competitive and useful in the Indo-Pacific. And so it's got to take off from Guam or it's got to take off from ADAC or something like that and be able to penetrate inside this, you know, hostile airspace that's being surveilled and tracked and

And so it's got to be stealthy, stealthy enough to slip through even to things like the JY-27A, which is the Chinese VHF, 3D VHF AESA radar.

And other radar arrays that they have like that. So that would drive you typically to a design that does not have a vertical stabilizer, just like the B-21. But you also really want to go fast because it's a tactical aircraft. So you want to get in and out very quickly. B-21 is subsonic. So this thing is going to have supersonic speed. I think President Trump and his representatives

It's something like it was going to be able to do two, I think is how he worded it. I'm assuming he's saying Mach 2. So, you know, and that's kind of F-22 speed. It's faster than an F-35 and way faster than a B-21.

That kind of gives you an idea of what it would need. In that case, it would benefit from the next generation adaptive propulsion program. So these new adaptive engines that have the three stream architecture with a sort of a secondary variable bypass flow to increase the fuel efficiency during cruise mode that you can shut off and go much faster when you accelerate when you want to.

So those are some of the other features that you could want. But again, it's going to be, you know, you can't really tell that from that shot, but this should be a really big aircraft because it's going to have to carry a lot of its own fuel to go these very long distances. And aircraft cost is measured by the pound. Right. So the bigger an aircraft is, the more it weighs, the more it costs to build and deliver.

Just want to pick on Matt here. What is the next thing you were looking for? Either if we get a clearer image or what kind of is the big questions you kind of have as we kind of see where this goes here in the next coming weeks, maybe months? I think that the inlet placement would be huge as far as determining, you know, what the con ops of this potential aircraft is. And I think...

More so than the kind of vague generational discussion, what's more helpful is to try to figure out a unified CONOPS. Because if you look at the USJROC JASED's process of how you establish a program's requirements and what the end result is as far as capability, that's very much mission flows from the mission. And so for the ATF, which became F-22 concept of operations, you

They thought in the 80s that a combination of low observability, super cruise maneuverability, and high altitude operation would be mutually supporting elements along with sensor fusion to give first look, first shot, first kill capability and to markedly improve the survivability of that platform. And moving that forward to today's threat environment and the geography as Steve was talking about, how many of those capabilities

core capabilities are relevant. And I think many of them still are foundationally relevant. Super Cruise is particularly relevant if they're being based further afield in those kind of second island chain kind of areas. But obviously, low observability has changed enormously over the past 40 years, having to deal with those new radar types that Steve was talking about, VHF,

kind of all aspects stealth threats with new sensor fusion. We're talking about new gallium nitride arrays, multifunction arrays, passive AMTI possibilities going forward. I think another interesting thing is at least I didn't see any kind of ERST or kind of EOIR kind of apertures present on the picture.

Steve, did you think the landing gear was particularly robust or do you have any conclusions about that? I didn't really look at it too hard. So I don't know, at least the landing gear. No, so it definitely is a single wheel landing gear like you would expect from an Air Force aircraft. But no, I didn't make any solid judgments on it. There is a new photo that's been released that I'm just looking at.

And it gives you a better view of the frontal section. Again, it looks like the aft section is obscured in this sort of cloud, but it still doesn't look like it has vertical stabilizers. I think that the key thing, though, is that it's not a delta. It's not like the, or the Ginkgo leaf, like the J36 configuration. Does it look a bit in the back? I mean, I could be wrong here, but does it almost remind one a bit of the McDonnell Douglas model?

Jast? Jast, yeah. Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. Well, and of course, that did have vertical stabilizers, although heavily canted, much more canted than the X35 or X32. But yeah, it's a little too unclear at this point to say that definitively, but I doubt it will have vertical stabilizers. I could say that anyway.

You know, we're just looking at it, really. So no firm conclusions yet on it, but it's fascinating. Yeah. Well, I mean, also kind of interesting, more at a high level, I guess, just to zoom out for a second. I mean, it is kind of incredible. We now really have...

arguably all the legs of the Air Force's future combat aircraft fleet kind of defined it. Well, at least the initial iteration, because we have the B-21 obviously in development and flying. We've got at least the first round of the CCAs awarded now and in development and probably are due to fly this year. And now we have the F-47. And I realize there's more CCAs to come, but it is kind of remarkable, to me at least. Steve, are you a bit more skeptical?

Well, only on the CCA part. So right now, the first increment of the prototypes are awarded. But the Air Force up to this point has said that they are willing to go back into competition for the production increment one aircraft with completely different designs, if possible. I don't think that's likely necessarily. So you can't really definitively say that those increment one prototypes are the increment one CCAs.

But we also don't know, because of the way the CCA program is set up, is that they could start those Increment 1 prototypes and then go, you know what, that's not what we want to do. I'm not saying that that's what they're going to do, but that is an option for them. And then just go to Increment 2 and whatever they decide for Increment 2, which have completely different requirements, different cost structure, different performance, all these things. And none of those requirements are set. Or if they have been set, they have not been released yet.

So we don't know where they're going with increment two. And then of course, two years later, they go to increment three. At least that was the original plan.

Trump administration can change all that, right? But it does seem like the military leadership of the Air Force, that's still what they want. They want this variable and constantly evolving set of options for that aircraft family. So by definition, almost, we will never really be able to say that we know exactly what the CCAs are going to be. I just have a feeling Increment 1 isn't really where the Air Force wants to stay. I think they have very different ideas for Increment 2 and Increment 3.

So we'll see how that goes. But yes, between Beach 21 and F-47 anyway now, we have a very good picture of where that 2030s, mid-2030s Air Force fleet, what that's going to look like. And are we assuming it's F-47 because 47th president?

Or is that... So, you know, it's interesting where we're going with these designations. Honestly, it should be the F-25, you know, in the same world because, you know, the F-35 should have been the F-24. But, you know, there was a mix-up when they announced the contract and it became the F-35. And then they announced the first increment one CCAs.

We're going to be the YFQ 42. And I think it was the YFQ 44. And so, you know, usually if you do have that, then there's F43 in there somewhere. There's an F45 and F46, and then you get to F47. It is possible that, you know, who knows with this administration, it's possible they could have just bypassed that and gone to F47 to make it align with Trump's place in the history of presidents or, you know,

The aviation journalist, the military aviation journalist in me would really like to know if that spot, those F-45 and F-40 CITICs were assigned to the operational prototypes that probably preceded this award. Or maybe those were the F-40 and F-41. I mean, a YF-40 and YF-41 or something like that. And of course, there's the Navy demonstrators that are probably out there too. Yeah.

And maybe they got a designation too. So I can't say that definitively. It is suspicious. I would say that F-47 got picked for that. I'm sure the Russians are going like, hey, we already took that designation for a fighter back with the Berkut, but they didn't put it into production. As cool as that forward swing concept was, you know, I don't think they can feasibly lay claim to something that they never actually produced. All right. Matt, any parting shots for you?

No, I think it is interesting, though, on Steve's thoughts about CCA as far as the Aerospace Innovation Initiative, which kind of helped birth this thing way back in the day, which Kendall was part of. The CCA concept really came quite a bit later from that. So it'll be interesting to see with the Air Force really being undecided on increment two for CCA. They're deferring the next generation aerial fueling system discussion. It really seems that

They've refocused on NGAT as being the most important thing that they're going to be focusing on for next generation aeronautics going forward. And so we'll have to wait and see, I think probably to see if they clear up their kind of how does unmanned complement picture fit on this? Because they've gone back and forth on do they want increment two to be more exquisite, less exquisite? Industry has their own thoughts about that right now as well. Yep. Right.

All right. Well, kind of what you just said reminds me of the phrase, the quarterback of the digital battlefield. Let's hope this one has a better future than Comanche did. And with that, maybe we'll wrap it for now.

Matt and Steve, thanks so much for jumping on this, on the breaking news. Also, special thanks to our podcast producer, Andre Copley-Smith, for your support, especially on very short notice. And of course, thanks to our audience for your time and attention. And as ever, please check back soon for another episode of Check 6, maybe on the FAXX Award?