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Welcome to Aviation Week's Check 6 podcast. It's been a busy time on the defense front, with firings at the Pentagon, signal group disclosures, another B-21 charge, and much more. But today we want to look at one of the biggest looming announcements from DoD: the anticipated U.S. Navy source selection on the F-AXX program, the Sea Services counterpart to the U.S. Air Force's F-47 NGAD that went to Boeing.
There's been rumors of an impending announcement now for a few weeks, and Northrop Grumman CEO Cathy Warden on the company's first quarter earnings call recently indicated that something was pending. So here to help you understand what is at stake in the FAXX competition are Brian Everstein, Aviation Week's Pentagon editor, and Senior Defense Editor Steve Trimble. I'm Robert Wall, your host for today and Aviation Week's Executive Editor for Defense and Space.
Brian, perhaps to launch us into our discussion, why don't you catch us up on what you learned about F-AXX at the recent Sea Air Space Symposium and what we know about the scope of the program more generally? Yeah, so as you mentioned, we've been pretty much expecting an imminent contract award for Goyan about a month now when reports first started coming out that the down select was expected on the heels of the Air Force's award.
It has been kind of looming over everything in the Navy over the past few weeks. At the Sea Airspace Conference a couple weeks ago, it was everybody would take me aside. Oh, who's going to win? When's the announcements coming? So it's been kind of this dark cloud over that we're expecting it to drop pretty soon.
And though who knows what that will be. And we're coming up into budget season. The budget is expected to drop next month. So it'll be interesting to see if there's going to be an imminent gigantic contract award right before we'll see the budget or if it could slip to that. But what the discussion was among some of the senior Navy leaders is that
We need it. That FXX is definitely needed for the future of naval aviation. The acting CNO, Emma Kilby, told reporters that the decision was at the secretary level, which she didn't specify if that was SECNAV or Secretary of Defense.
but then said that they need to come to a decision soon that the Navy needs it. I talked with the Air Boss, Admiral Cheever, who says that he really needs it for carrier aviation to see the mix of fourth, fifth, and sixth generation on the Navy carriers coming in the next few decades. So it's expected, it's needed. And one open question that I've had that was kind of played down by Admiral Cheever and some of the other Navy leaders is how could really this
be affordable. The Navy obviously has a huge shipbuilding bill coming due. They're trying to do FXX. They're trying to do a few other big programs. But there is an understanding that they can kind of afford it within the budget level that they have. And one key aspect of that, I think, that is feeding into it is the capabilities that they're looking at for FXX or maybe potentially LAC
thereof. Not looking at gigantic, huge leaps in technology, not looking at an adaptive engine, looking at more of a derivative engine. One, probably the only real big solid detail that did come out about F-AXX recently was from N-98, the head of air warfare requirements for the Navy Admiral Donnelly said that they're looking at a 25% jump in range for the F-AXX compared to current carrier-based fighters, which is an increase, but
maybe be a bit of a letdown when you're looking at a generational jump in aircraft. And I know we're going to get a little bit more into some of that. So hopefully we're going to see a down select soon. Hopefully we'll get more of an idea of where the Navy wants to go, but that's kind of the open question going on right now. Yeah. Thanks Brian for that good synopsis of where we, where things stand at the moment. And yeah, that 25% range, uh,
I think is very significant. I think we're going to dive into that. But also the engine. That was something that Admiral Donnelly, Vice Admiral Donnelly in 98 told us about back in November. And when we got this exclusive interview where he really laid out some of the more significant details of where they had ended up with the FXX requirements.
And one of them, because, you know, there had been so much attention on adaptive propulsion going back years, really 2006, when the Adaptive Engine Technology Program got started at Air Force Research Laboratory. And the Navy was part of that for many years. They had a sort of a side program or a parallel program called VCAT.
that was very similar. And there was a lot of cross interest and funding and participation between the two services on that. But he confirmed that, in fact, next generation adaptive propulsion won't be the engine choice for FAXX and that they'll use a derivative of an existing military engine
And that's really interesting, you know, because when you're talking about that, you know, what immediately comes to mind is something like the F-135, which is the engine that powers the F-35. That's not really possible for a tactical aircraft because we're going to assume this may be a wrong assumption, but for a next generation carrier based fighter that doesn't have a Stovall short takeoff and vertical landing requirement, it's going to be a twin engine aircraft.
And a twin engine aircraft for a fighter, really you can't put up two 45,000 pound thrust engines side by side. Because when you do that, you really get a bomber. That's a huge aircraft just to have the structure to accommodate this five foot diameter inlet for both engines.
So you're going to have two smaller engines, probably in that 30,000 pound thrust to 35,000 pound thrust with afterburner, you know, in that sort of range. And that puts you in, you know, if you're going with an existing engine among the American options, obviously that's a pretty safe bet for FAXX. You'd have either the Pratt-Whitney F119 or the GE F110.
And, um, I think it's, you know, I think this is relevant both for F-47, the U.S. Air Force fighter, as well as the F-AXX, that we're going to see, you know, one of those engines, power one or both of those fighters, right?
We heard from the Air Force that next-generation adaptive propulsion remains a long-term option for F-47, but it may not and is probably not baselined in the short term for Increment One. Rather, it's going to be a derivative of an existing engine. So which one is it? So far, GE has released two statements acknowledging that the F-47 contract has been awarded to Boeing and that they're very pleased about this.
Pratt Whitney has said nothing. Now, in these types of classified programs, that's actually kind of a huge tip-off that it's probably GE that won the contract. That's really interesting. I'm also curious, since we're on the industrial side, let's briefly, before we talk about what this all means for the Navy and the program, let's maybe briefly touch on prime levels. We've actually not said. So as far as we know, the only remaining competitors are Boeing,
and Northrop Grumman. And interesting there, of course, is they've been partners on the Hornet slash Super Hornet for quite a long time. And now they are competing against each other here. And it seems, I mean, I'm kind of curious what you guys both make of this. I mean, Northrop didn't bid, decided not to bid NGAT in the end, which makes you probably think maybe they're all in on this.
Boeing's been in both and won one. Not sure we want to handicap it necessarily, but I'm kind of wondering if you guys can give us, our listeners, a bit of perspective of what's at play here and kind of what this means from an industrial perspective. So I can sort of talk about the different advantages that each company can bring to the table. So
They both have had a long relationship with the Navy. Grumman goes back to the 1940s, and so does McDonnell, the legacy part of Boeing that became part of Boeing later, and Douglas for that matter. So that continues to this day. Northrop has a huge role with the Navy, with the E2D.
They're essentially the OEM for the electronic attack version of the Super Hornet, which is the E-18G Growler in the sense that they provide the mission system. Plus they do the center fuselage. It's also interesting to note then this competition between Northrop and Boeing. Northrop produced the Hornet. I mean, that was their fighter back in the early 1970s in the lightweight fighter competition. It was the Cobra. That was the internal name for it.
But when it came time to offer it to the Navy, the Navy was uncomfortable awarding a carrier-based fighter contract to Northrop. So they forced Northrop to partner with McDonnell Douglas at the time, which later became Boeing. And now Boeing owns the Super Hornet, even though it was actually designed and produced as a prototype by Northrop, which is just kind of an interesting thing.
But Northrop also has the capacity to do digital engineering and digital design at a very high level. We've seen that with B-21, and we've seen them spin out prototypes from a digital engineering ecosystem very quickly from their scale composites unit with the Model 401 Sierra test aircraft, as well as the Model 437, which we saw emerge just last year.
So that's really what they're bringing to the table. Now, Boeing, they've had a lot of struggles, right? I mean, that's not a secret to anybody, especially on the defense side, one also on the commercial side, but on the defense side and their fixed price contracts, they've just been getting hammered, losing a lot of money on those programs and facing a lot of setbacks in terms of the execution. But for the Navy programs, they've actually had a pretty good run, right? Super Hornet worked out pretty well for the Navy. They got way more than they were expecting when they started the program.
E-18G, you know, pretty much worked out, you know, just like how the Navy had planned. The P-8A has been sort of cited as a model acquisition program. It did take a bit longer to get the full capability into that airframe, but it worked out fairly well. So they do have a pretty good relationship with the Navy even to this day.
And what Boeing also did, so we know of two X-planes that were awarded through the Next Generation Air Dominance Program. One went to Boeing, and that first flew in 2019. And the other one went to Lockheed Martin, and that flew in 2022. So we don't know that Northrop
has a government-funded operational prototype for their next-generation air dominance aircraft. And that is a little bit significant when you consider that this is a supersonic aircraft, right? And so, you know, that's just something that Northrop hasn't done for a long time. Now, it's not beyond Northrop's capacity, and we've been doing supersonic aircraft since 1947. Northrop has done plenty of them, but nothing new in the last 40 years that also has all these advanced features built in as well.
So that's one other aspect of this where Boeing brings something to the table that North may not have. And then the other thing is Boeing went out and they made these very public investments worth $2 billion in infrastructure, just building in the manufacturing capacity to work on these advanced new aircraft, right? And if you drill down to their project in St. Louis to create this advanced combat aircraft facility, they have two final assembly projects
buildings planned. In phase one, it's believed to be the Air Force F-47 assembly building that's being erected right now. And then there's a follow-on phase two,
It's supposed to work on the Navy final assembly. Well, I mean, I'm assuming it's to work on the Navy final assembly building. Of course, they could put collaborative combat aircraft if they want any future increments of that and maybe other things, but that's kind of how they set that up. And so they have the capacity. They made this upfront investment in the land and the infrastructure. They got all the permits approved, you know, and they went through all those processes to be ready to start on this right away.
And I think that might be a significant part of this. So.
Both companies bring certain advantages to the table. And what we don't know, of course, is what the actual requirements are and how the proposals and the pricing and all that was sort of factored in. So that's stuff we don't know. Brian, I'm just kind of curious. Did you get a sense from at Navy League or something else? Like who seemed more, I guess, who seemed more desperate? Who seemed confident? Yeah.
Is there anything you picked up or just kind of vibes? Well, as Steve was talking, I was remembering back to, I was at the Tailhook convention back in 2023 when the Navy first announced, laid out the competitors back when Lockheed was still in it. And the very first company I talked to right out of the gate to give me a statement was Northrop to lay down their visual engineering expertise, how they're well-positioned.
to support the Navy, bringing out also the E2 expertise. And then over the past couple of years, it seems like every update we get on timeline doesn't come from the Navy, doesn't come from the Pentagon. It's been coming from Kathy Worden in earnings calls. She's been the one updating us on timeline for this award. And you mentioned she had mentioned it this week. So there will seem to be some confidence on the Northrop Grumman side. Bowen is usually a little reticent to talk about
6th Gen, I mean, they couldn't even say the letters NGAD for a while. When I was talking to Airbus, I was also speaking with Dan Gillian, their head of air dominance, and they were talking about MQ-25, it's supposed to get its first flight. And when we asked about FXX, Admiral Cheever pointed to Dan and said, oh, they also have a lot riding on this. So I would say that Northrop was happy to talk more so than probably Boeing has been over the past couple of years. Interesting. Let's briefly talk about what it actually means for the Navy.
This decision for the Navy is so important, right? If you think about the surface fleet is designed around the aircraft carrier and the carrier strike group. And the whole point of that is to project power with these carrier-based fighters and aircraft. So,
And the big question is, and the question I still have in my mind is, does the Navy have the requirements right for this aircraft to participate in a scenario that involves South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, which are the most, I'd say, relevant military scenarios and the most stressing of the military scenarios for the foreseeable future for the U.S.?
When you think about that context, that does impose certain very strenuous requirements in your aircraft design, especially for a carrier-based fighter, which has limited space. And so you've got this huge distances between friendly air bases in the Pacific.
And you have China's ability to project their own military capabilities in the forms of just a smorgasbord of anti-ship weapons, whether they be ballistic missiles like DF-21D or the CM-401, Africa with the Chinese designation of that is, but anyway, a short range ballistic missile.
But they also have anti-ship cruise missiles, a whole variety of them. And they have those capabilities to fire those and fire hundreds of them at the carrier battle group. And so what you need for the aircraft carrier to participate in this in a way that's somewhat safe, right? I mean, it's a war, so it's not safe, but you don't want to take undue risk with the platform as large and with so much capacity as an aircraft carrier.
You want to be able to have your fighters be able to fly defensive air patrols a thousand miles from the carrier because that's where they need to go after the launching systems for these ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. And then, you know, the ones that actually still get through, you have to hunt those down and shoot them down before they approach the carrier.
And so you need to have this aircraft with a significant amount of range. It needs to operate 800 to 1,000 nautical miles. Now, when we heard about that 25% increase, that's on a baseline of it's replacing the Super Hornet. That's got about 635 nautical miles. So if it's 25% more than that, then you're talking about 750 nautical miles.
F-35C is around 660, 670 nautical miles notionally on paper. So 25% is a little bit higher than that if that's what they're using as the baseline for that 25% figure. But it doesn't quite get you to that
800 to 1,000 nautical mile range. Now, they do have MQ-25s on the deck, so that can provide you 1,500 pounds of fuel at 500 nautical miles radius from the carrier, so that can keep them out on station for much longer. Except, I mean, 15,000 pounds of fuel doesn't go very far with these aircraft. I mean, keep in mind that the internal fuel volume of an F-35C is 19,000 pounds.
which is greater than the entire fuel offload capacity of one MQ-25. So, and this aircraft would probably carry even more than that, right? So it helps, but it doesn't solve all your problems. So I was a little disappointed to hear about the 25% range increase. I would think it needs to be in that sort of 33% to 50% increase. Of course, then you've got an issue with trying to
get an aircraft with that much internal fuel volume to land on a carrier and to operate it from a carrier with the limited geometry and just space that you have in that context. So that's one of the issues. And the other is just a philosophical thing because, you know, I think of
The 1980s Top Gun, when we think about that sort of height of carrier-based aviation, you had F-14 on the deck doing long-range fleet air defense. And that was backed up by the classic version of the Hornet doing air superiority with the A-6 doing long-range strike and a variant for electronic warfare.
And today, fast forward 40 years, Super Hornet is now doing that long range intercept for fleet defense and air superiority. And then you've got F-35 doing that A-6 role of long range strike and the E-18G replacing the E-A-6.
And those are two multi-role fighters that can really, they're almost interchangeable. They can do, you know, F-35C can do fleet air defense as well as probably the Super Hornet, if not better. And there's some things Super Hornet can do. It can carry AIM-174 that the F-35C can't, at least internally. That makes it, you know, good at that long range intercept role.
But, you know, what you don't have and what I thought F-AXX would give them the opportunity to do was to go back to that highly specialized, optimized fleet air defense fighter, like the modern version of the F-14. Not, I'm not saying an F-14 itself, but I mean, a new aircraft that was designed principally around a single mission of fleet air defense.
And they chose not to do that. That was one of the things Admiral Donnelly also told me back in November, is that they can't afford to go to those highly specialized single mission type designs. Everything on the carrier needs to be multi-role, needs to do a lot of different jobs. Now, that makes a lot of sense. There's only so much you can do on a carrier, only so many aircraft you can bomb, even on a Ford class carrier. But
You are compromising the design, your ability to do any particular mission if you're designing it to do a whole bunch of different missions. That's really the tension inherent with all these things. But it just means that we're going to have another multi-role fighter and really two different, you know, between the F-35C and whatever F-AXX becomes, we're going to have two different multi-role fighters on the deck. And that's a little surprising to me.
Yeah, interesting. Before we wrap it up here, perhaps one more thing. Brian, we also had some comments here from Lockheed who are not in the FXX competition and lost on NGAD obviously in the recent days that A, they wouldn't protest on the F-47, but also they kind of laid out their strategy on basically how they want to play in this space going forward. So kind of just
Just give us a quick synopsis on what Lockheed's future fighter plan is, so to speak.
Understanding seems to be that Lockheed went a little too far, went a little too exquisite on FXX to meet the Navy's requirements. And in an earnings call this week, we kind of got a preview of where Lockheed really wants to go. And that's just double down on F-35, take some lessons learned from their NGAD design, kind of bolster up, give, they say, turn the F-35 into a Ferrari, like a NASCAR type upgrade to add
advanced sensors, advanced technologies to make that a fifth and a half type generation fighter, which is kind of a bold statement coming right now. I mean, Lockheed's having a lot of trouble meeting the needed F-35 requirements for Block 4, Tech Refresh 3. That's been long delayed, been very needed and getting some consternation from the Pentagon on meeting that schedule. So, Stephen, if you want to add. The strategy that they laid out yesterday is
Kind of what you'd expect them to have to say. I mean, what else can they say? You know, they don't have F-47 and they're not in the running for FXX anymore. So when they talk about the future of aeronautics, they say, well, hey, we've already got an aircraft in production and an aircraft in service. We can keep upgrading those. We can take 80 percent of the capability that we were developing for the sixth generation.
And we believe we can insert those into our existing fighters at half the cost of that compared to what's going to happen with F-47 and F-AXX.
I mean, I do wonder how they actually do that because, I mean, those capabilities do come with a certain amount of cost. I assume it's not going to be the tailless plan form that we're expecting for F-47. You can't do that with the F-35, but there's other things they can do. Much more advanced power and thermal management system we know is already baseline coming after Block 4 for F-35. New types of radar capabilities, electronic warfare capabilities, networking, and the ability to control satellites.
autonomous aircraft from the single pilot cockpits is also something they can continue developing on those things. But
They also might have a point, right? Because, you know, Boeing with the F-47 has got to figure out how to execute this and they've got to keep the program sold. And that's always a challenge, especially when you've already got a production line that is already out there in Fort Worth and as well as in Camari, Italy and Nagoya, Japan, that is pumping out 156 aircraft a year. At least it has that capacity, obviously, but
It's been a while since they've taken that many because of the various issues that they've been having. And they continue to have some of those issues. So that's part of this, too. And they've got to work those out in Fort Worth. But they have something on the table in production. Sometimes that's all you need to actually get this done and present an attractive alternative. And it doesn't hurt in this context.
in Lockheed's sort of vision of the future, that although the Air Force program is very fully funded, F-47 has got $20 billion in the FIDEP, the Navy gutted the funding for F-AXX over a year ago when they submitted their fiscal year 2025 budget to Congress. It reduced the amount of money that they had set aside for this program by $1.
20, 25 percent. Sorry, no, it's always, but that was all that was left. So they actually reduced it by almost 70 percent over that period compared to where it had been just the previous year. And they haven't restored it yet. So it's also kind of a mystery that they're awarding this contract now, even though they really can't pay for it, certainly on the pace that they were envisioning just a couple of years ago.
So that's another mystery. Maybe they expect Congress to bail them out or this huge Trump funding increase that has been talked about. Maybe that some of that will go to this, but there's a lot of other mouths to feed with things that they've started. So that's just another part of this that we have to sort of see how that works out.
Great. Well, I suggest we rest the podcast here. We'll obviously be back once we know who won FAXX, maybe soon.
So thank you, Steve. Thank you, Brian, for jumping on this topic. And thanks to our producer, Guy Frenaho, as well, for his help. And of course, as always, thank you, all our listeners, for giving us your time and attention. And please come back for another episode of Check 6 back soon. Thanks much, and maybe that one too on FAXX.
Aviation Week's defense conference is coming. Join military and civilian leaders, industry experts, stakeholders, and allies in Washington, D.C. on May 13th and 14th to share knowledge in a collaborative environment. Participants will explore the challenges confronting leaders, including geopolitical threats, how to strengthen the industrial base, emerging technology trends, and more.
Head to events.aviationweek.com or click the link in the description of this podcast to register.