I won’t lie, I really wanted the successor to the Grumman Iron Works, Northrop Grumman, to get the award…just to have that legacy back on the flight deck…but…I am not emperor.
…the Department of War announces a contract awarded by the U.S. Navy to Boeing for the Sixth-Generation F/A-XX Strike Fighter under the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. The contract is valued at more than $20B for the full-scale development phase. The contract procures multiple test aircraft for ground, airworthiness, systems, and weapons integration testing.
Boeing already has the USAF’s F-47 contract…so I will assume there will be a fair bit of commonality. Perhaps a similar path to how the YF-17 became the F/A-18? We’ll see, won’t we?
Based on the fuzzy image Boeing put out at the top of the post, it appears to be tailless…dare I say, a flying wing.
I’m not as concerned with aesthetics as I am with robustness at sea and being designed for the requirements of a carrier-based fighter (…and yes, get rid of the F/A and just use F)
Everyone here knows some of my baseline requirements for F/A-XX, in order of importance:
- Range: The Pacific’s vastness demands range from you, but that vastness also grants you more security. Range gives you safety and flexibility.
- Numbers: We have to build a lot of them and be able to scale if needed. That means the right compromise between cutting edge and practical production. The next Great Pacific War will not be measured in weeks or months, but years. We will have significant battlefield losses.
- Capacity: Carry a lot of fuel and a lot of weapons.
In summary…and you know where this is going…it has to be a heavy fighter.
I will make the assumption that the A-model will be single seat…but there are a whole host of missions (which we have a F/A-18E and F)—especially with the integration of collaborative combat drones—that make a two seat heavy fighter an additional tool in the airwing toolbag that you will need.
This next line gives me a bit of hope.
Following this contact award announcement, Boeing will deliver the platform to augment and eventually replace legacy F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers beginning in the 2030s, and operate alongside the F-35C.
EA-XX should be a two seater…so the engineering will have to be done anyway.
The aviation version of the transformationalists will enlist the accountants and the drone-autists to try to force an all single-seat fleet, but that would be a mistake. They might get support from those who read more military fiction than understand military practice, so there will be an ongoing argument that hopefully isn’t engineered into a fait accompli.
Again, we’ll see.
The important thing is we can now move forward to prototype testing and eventual production.
Chop chop. History is impatient.
Meanwhile…we still don’t know a lot…but we can guess.
Over on YouTube, BingoFuel put this out three days ago. Nice overview of why the future is tailless.
Posted CDR Salamander / Substack
