NGAD: America's Masterstroke in Sixth-Gen Fighter Innovation (Reupload)

Introduction

Imagine an aircraft that breaks all the rules, one that sets a new standard for what human beings are capable of creating. Imagine an aircraft so advanced in its technological capability, so capable of blurring the lines between man and machine, that it and its human pilot form a symbiosis that science-fiction writers couldn’t dream of. And imagine an aircraft, despite its small size, that can outclass and handily defeat any plane in the skies today. It’s the one plane, to rule them all.

If the United States Air Force has its way, the aircraft we’re describing is closer than we might think—so close, in fact, that a prototype has already taken to the skies. This air-superiority fighter, if it does exist, is the brainchild of the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance program, or NGAD, and it’s slated to make even the Air Force’s own F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II obsolete.

One way or another, this will not be the last time you hear us talk about the NGAD on Megaprojects. The program is currently in its early stages, with the vast majority of the answers we’re most curious about being guarded under lock, key, and top-secret classification. But here in the NGAD’s first days, before it’s even received its proper name, we’re going to take a deep dive into what a next-generation fighter aircraft might be, what we know about the NGAD, and when, if ever, it might take command of the skies.

Entering the Sixth Generation

In March of 2014, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced that it had completed its so-called Air Dominance Initiative Study—an investigation into the technologies and resources that would define the next generation of aerial combat. In response to the study, the United States Air Force kicked off the NGAD program, alongside the US Navy, who kicked off a separate NGAD program that’s basically looking to do the same thing, and which we’re going to assume will follow after the Air Force’s version.

The Air Force’s NGAD program is meant to build a next-generation fighter aircraft, and for most of the world, building a “next-generation” fighter plane would translate to building a so-called fifth-generation plane. Fifth-gen fighter aircraft have a few key characteristics: enhanced stealth capabilities, the ability to fly at supercruise, advanced avionics, and supermaneuverability, all of which put them a league above the fighter aircraft that most of the world possesses. But the United States, as well as China and, if you’re particularly gullible, Russia, all have fifth-generation fighters already, meaning that for the US, a next-generation fighter would move toward territory that the world hasn’t yet attempted to traverse: a sixth-generation fighter.

It’s obviously very hard to put a finger on precisely what will define a sixth-generation aircraft—partly, because we just won’t know until somebody actually builds one, and partly because whichever country is next-up in building a really advanced aircraft, is probably going to call it sixth-generation just because nobody else can really correct them without building their own. But military experts have identified a few key characteristics that future sixth-generation aircraft are likely to possess, and what that list doesn’t include, is just as important as what it does.

A sixth-generation aircraft, at least generally, is not going to be wasting its time in close-quarters aerial dogfights with other combat aircraft. Instead, it’ll be more than able to shoot enemy aircraft down using long-range weapons before the enemy aircraft can even see them—and perhaps, before the enemy even knows that the sixth-generation fighter is there. Instead, sixth-gen fighters will likely have enhanced abilities to attack ground targets, engage in electronic and cyber-warfare, and even travel into space.

As in all things 21st-century, automation and artificial intelligence are also crucial in a sixth-generation aircraft, which will likely be able to operate in both manned and unmanned modes. Finally, they will sit at the center of a battlefield in a command-and-control role, communicating with unmanned drones, other fighter aircraft, soldiers on the ground, tacticians at a base far from conflict, and even the plane’s own suite of hyper-advanced sensors and technology. Data fusion, machine-learning, and even virtual-reality tools for pilots could all play a central role in the fighter aircraft to come.

Stealth technology might become even more advanced, and some theorists believe that directed-energy weapons—that is, lasers—might be included with sixth-generation aircraft too.

Now, a quick look at the United States’ current Air Force, compared to the rest of the world, might have you asking why, exactly, the US would need a sixth-generation aircraft so quickly. Although China’s J-20 fighter is being mass-produced, it’s still vastly outnumbered by American fifth-generation planes, and the oncoming J-31 isn’t likely to turn the tides. The Russian Su-57 appears to be one hell of a dud, and although we’ve done a recent video on some of the other fifth-generation aircraft popping up around the world, it’s unlikely that any of those aircraft will be mass-produced within the decade. The American F-35, with software updates, is expected to remain in front-line service for a very long time, and given that thousands of those planes are already built or on order, it doesn’t seem feasible that any other world power could catch up.

But a closer look around the world suggests that some nations might be looking to skip over the fifth-generation fighter entirely, and instead, go straight for generation six. Japan’s F-X program may include sixth-generation elements, and although we take this with some healthy skepticism, Russia has claimed that it’s started work on the PAK DP aircraft, a super-advanced interceptor. India has made allusions to their desire to lay the groundwork for sixth-gen research, and the Future Combat Air System, a collaborative effort between Britain, Sweden, Italy, France, Germany, and Spain, endeavors to bring Europe its first indigenously-produced sixth-gen aircraft. Finally, and perhaps most concerning for the US military, China has built on its successful production of the J-20 with exploratory research into a sixth-generation fighter of their own.

Taken together, this spells the sort of trouble that the American military loves to address, an urgent reason—or, a convenient excuse, depending on how you see it—to throw a metric fuck-ton of money at the Air Force’s R&D budget, in hopes that the American military might just remain ahead of the curve. On the American side, the Air Force and the Navy both expect to retire a number of older fighter aircraft in the coming decades, with no new orders of F-35s expected to replace them, meaning that if the US is going to keep its bases and aircraft carriers stocked, then a sixth-generation fighter is the best way to do it.

A Murky Program

The exact participants in the NGAD, like most other things about the program, are currently unknown, but given that Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman have all expressed their own dedication toward researching sixth-generation technologies, it’s probable that at least one, and perhaps all of those companies are involved with the NGAD program. Lockheed Martin, in particular, has produced both of America’s fifth-generation fighters, suggesting that they might be especially well-equipped to help the Air Force out on this one.

What we know for certain, is that once DARPA had completed its exploratory study, they launched a second program—this time, with the goal of developing X-planes, experimental planes that the US government can then then test, tweak, and refine at their leisure. A year later, the Air Force announced their Air Superiority 2030 plan, which didn’t call for the development of a specific plane, but instead, a list of technological capabilities which could then be adapted into multiple aircraft.

Eventually, the 2030 plan became the NGAD program, which, according to the Air Force, has four publicly acknowledged technological priorities. The program is supposed to produce advanced engine technology, providing more power for the same amount of fuel, while running cooler engines. It’s looking to include uncrewed aircraft, which we’ll talk about later, in addition to a manned air-superiority fighter. The program will develop new composites and structures to perform the job of an aircraft better while being lower-cost, and the eventual finished product will include a range of sensors and electronic capacities that should significantly one-up anything that you could attach to a plane today.

And although the NGAD program is fairly new—or, at least, that’s what the public believes—the Air Force announced in 2020 that they had already designed, assembled, and flown a technology-demonstrator prototype. It’s unclear just how many of the features eventually intended for the fighter, were ready for inclusion in this early prototype, but two years later, the Air Force announced that the NGAD’s technology was far enough along that the program was moving into the engineering, manufacture, and design phase. That is to say, the Air Force already has the bulk of the technologies they need to incorporate into the fighter, so now it’s just a matter of finalizing the craft itself and figuring out how its production lines will work.

What the Air Force has announced, is that their technology demonstrator has “broken a lot of records”—although whether those are altitude, speed, payload, design, or some other sort of record, is completely unknown. And despite a couple of pieces of artwork by Lockheed Martin, which depict a super-advanced manned fighter that some analysts believe might be the NGAD, there is no way to verify any aspects of the NGAD’s true outward appearance.

It’s hard to say whether this means that the hard part is over, or just getting started, but regardless, we’re currently three years past the announcement of a flight demonstrator. The F-22 program took seven years to get from the first flight of an industry prototype, to the first flight of a development version of the plane, while the F-35 program took six years to go from the first flight of an experimental craft to the first flight of a production-line model, suggesting that at this stage, the NGAD is probably roughly halfway between demonstrator and the beginnings of assembly-line production. Using the F-35 program as a comparison, experimental versions of the craft had completed flight testing by the three-year mark, and though we certainly can’t confirm that the NGAD has done the same, it’s entirely feasible that some folks with a very high security clearance might have a clear idea of the plane, inside and out.

One other detail the Air Force has revealed, is the NGAD’s price tag. The program requested an allotment of $1.66 billion in 2023, with projections indicating that it will need another $11.7 billion between 2024 and 2027. These are a significant hike when compared to the program allotments prior to 2022, which called for under a billion dollars annually, but according to the Air Force themselves, a billion dollars might not get the US very far when it comes to the aircraft itself.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has indicated that a single NGAD aircraft is likely to cost well into the hundreds of millions. That may be comparable to, or greater than the F-22’s price tag, $143 million in today’s money, and it certainly outpaces the F-35 at $75 million a copy, but given that the Air Force and Navy have well over a thousand F-35s on order, the NGAD’s projection may not be too daunting for America’s military super-budget.

Finally, we’ve got to discuss the idea of the so-called “digital Century Series”, a reference to a policy that the Air Force pursued during the 1950s and 1960s. In the original Century Series, the Air Force responded to the development of rapidly advancing jet technology by producing relatively quick runs of a variety of aircraft, prioritizing flexible production lines and adaptability, because they knew that any aircraft they produced in a given year, would probably be obsolete ten years later. Today’s Air Force is hoping to develop that same flexible production ability, producing a higher number of aircraft designs and production lines, in order to cope with the rapidly changing demands of the digital world. This could potentially mean that different companies might receive contracts to work on the same aircraft—that, say, an aircraft design firm might get a long-term contract to produce multiple aircraft designs, which they’d then pass off to a company whose contracts allow it to produce all the aircraft they can, only for the completed aircraft to move into the care of a company contracted to give it operational support during its service life.

The implications of this approach could be game-changing, not just for the American military-industrial complex, but for the Air Force as well. While the F-35, by example, is expected to have a service life through the 2070s, the NGAD program might actually be meant to field a whole collection of aircraft, each of which would assimilate the top-of-the-line technologies that the program is trying to provide. This, obviously, would be a bit of a dream situation for us here on Megaprojects, and it would be a fascinating process to observe, as short runs of individual aircraft quickly respond to the needs of a given moment.

Having these aircraft built in a modular approach, where various individual systems can be rapidly overhauled and re-integrated into a given old or new aircraft, would bring a sort of cutting-edge versatility that modern air forces can only dream of. An April 2022 announcement by the Air Force’s Chief of Staff, who disclosed that the NGAD’s flight control and mission system software would be developed separately, gave at least one early hint that this is precisely where the NGAD program is headed.

The Loyal Wingman

And there’s one other wrinkle in the NGAD program that we’ve really, really got to talk about: the concept of the loyal wingman, a series of uncrewed drones that Secretary Kendall has announced will fly directly alongside the NGAD’s manned fighters. In a 2023 conference in Aurora, Colorado, Kendall announced that the Air Force is looking for an initial run of 200 NGAD fighters, which, in itself, was a big revelation. But he also specified that along with the 200 fighters, the Air Force expects to procure 1,000 drones to back those planes up in combat. Of those thousand, four hundred will be allotted to the NGAD fighters—basically, two drones per fighter. The other six hundred will fall in behind three hundred specially modified F-35 fighters, potentially with the option to upgrade the rest of the F-35 fleet to get drone buddies of its own.

Drone wingmen are one of those things that have been talked about in military aviation for decades, but they’re particularly difficult to actually build, and before 2023, there were only minimal indicators that they might pass from science fiction to science fact. While most drones are either controlled by operators on the ground, or otherwise have fairly simple functions to carry out by themselves in the sky, a wingman for a fighter aircraft would have to be fully autonomous, and capable of participating in fast-paced, unpredictable aerial combat, with no dependence on outside input. After all, it would be basically unfeasible to employ enough drone-operator teams to keep a thousand wingman UAVs in the sky at a given time.

It’s a very tough challenge to design, but it’s exactly what the Air Force is hoping to introduce. Named the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA, this loyal-wingman drone is said to be able to participate in electronic attacks, and carry and fire air-to-air or air-to-surface missiles. Since stealthy aircraft need to store their missiles in internal weapons bays, they can’t carry very many, but a pilot with two drones’ worth of additional missiles is a hell of a lot more dangerous on the battlefield.

Drone wingmen would also be able to sacrifice themselves in a battle environment much more easily than a human pilot would, transforming US air power into a force where two-thirds of its airborne casualties won’t matter much in the long run, making a whole range of previously unthinkable attack and defense tactics perfectly reasonable. These drones could also fly complex patterns without having to worry about the effects of G-forces, and they’d be quite a bit easier and cheaper to produce than an equal number of additional NGAD fighters.

The Air Force’s Service Acquisition Chief, Andrew Hunter, is on record describing these CCA wingmen as “very much within grasp”, strongly implying that they’re likely to enter service around or at the same time that the NGAD starts showing up in Air Force squadrons. According to Secretary Kendall, “One way to think of CCAs is as remotely controlled versions of the targeting pods, electronic warfare pods or weapons now carried under the wings of our crewed aircraft”. This could potentially be a way of simplifying the technology required for a drone wingman; after all, even current fifth-generation fighters are meant to conduct air-to-air combat at very long range, with the basic assumption that if they find themselves needing to dogfight in close quarters, then something has gone very, very wrong.

As such, it may be a lot more feasible to teach these CCAs to stay close to their manned fighter plane and launch weapons as needed, with more advanced aerial combat capabilities coming later. Brigadier General Dale White, who oversees the Air Force’s program on advanced aircraft, has specified that much of the AI and aircraft-team operating programs needed for the CCAs already exist, as part of the Air Force’s so-called Project Skyborg, and the XQ-58 Valkyrie prototype is expected to be a test-bed for future advancements.

Squinting At a Timeline

So if the NGAD really is what it appears to be, the final, and perhaps most critical question is: When will the program’s first fighter aircraft enter active service? In 2022, Air Force Secretary Kendall has stated that at least some of the NGAD’s capabilities will be delivered by 2030, but this is obviously very vague. Kendall also stated that the NGAD would be approaching production by the end of this decade, but as for how that squares with only some of the NGAD’s capabilities being available by then, is hard to say. Perhaps the Air Force really does intend to pursue several iterations of a fighter aircraft, with their first iteration featuring only a smaller proportion of the NGAD’s eventual suite of technologies, or perhaps one of Kendall’s statements was meant to take precedence over the other.

One hint comes from the US Navy, rather than the Air Force, which is working on its own NGAD program, but also looking at the production of a new surface warship and a new submarine. According to the Navy, their NGAD program will begin acquiring production-line aircraft before either their warship or submarine programs award any contracts, and given the Navy’s reliance on the F-35 for their latest fighter acquisition, it’s entirely possible that the fighter/attack aircraft they’re looking at for their NGAD is the same one the Air Force wants. This could imply production-line assembly beginning within the next four to six years, with deliveries on an aircraft matching up well against the timeline Secretary Kendall provided, and since the Navy has a number of other programs waiting for approval, we can reasonably assume that they’ve got some very clear expectations around their own acquisitions timeline.

And a second indicator comes from the Air Force’s statements about its F-22 fighter, which, despite being a cutting-edge aircraft even twenty-plus years after it first took to the skies…well, it’s getting old, and it’s not likely to be survivable in air-to-air battles far past 2030. The Air Force’s decision to fast-track the NGAD likely isn’t a coincidence, and it’s understandable that they might want to be able to slot a new fighter cleanly into the combat role that the F-22 leaves behind.

That being said, a number of Air Force and Pentagon personnel have expressed skepticism about the prospect of having a production-line NGAD fighter by the end of this decade. Given the myriad delays behind the F-22 and F-35 programs, a level of concern about such an ambitious timeline is already understandable, but with only a few years between now and 2030, it becomes less and less likely that the Air Force can thread that particular needle in time. Perhaps a delivery timeline closer to 2035 will make a bit more sense—and for the record, it’s highly unlikely that any other nation would have their own sixth-generation aircraft, anytime remotely close to that deadline.

So, at present, that’s just about all we know about the NGAD, about its technological sophistication, its potentially innovative approach to short-run, high-tech aircraft creation, and about when we might expect to see it in the skies. But with such a potentially groundbreaking aircraft, one that seems to be just inches away from an official announcement, you can bet that we’ll be back here on Megaprojects one day, diving into the sixth-generation fighter plane—or, even, multiple planes—that the NGAD will introduce to the skies.

Key Takeaways

• The NGAD program aims to develop a sixth-generation fighter aircraft, surpassing current fifth-generation capabilities.
• The NGAD aircraft will focus on long-range engagements, electronic warfare, and autonomous operations.
• The Air Force plans to produce 200 NGAD fighters and 1,000 uncrewed drones, known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft.
• The NGAD program is expected to enter production by the end of the decade, with some capabilities delivered by 2030.
• The NGAD’s development includes advanced engine technology, new composites, and enhanced sensor and electronic capacities.

Sources

• Original MegaProjects video: NGAD: America’s Masterstroke in Sixth-Gen Fighter Innovation (Reupload)
• https://www.japcc.org/articles/fifth-generation-air-combat/
• https://www.businessinsider.com/what-features-and-design-will-a-6th-generation-fighter-have-2022-9
• https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/1009fighter/
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• https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/IF11659.pdf
• https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/usafs-6th-gen-fighter-in-development
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• https://news.usni.org/2023/01/18/cno-gilday-next-generation-air-dominance-will-come-ahead-of-ddgx-destroyer
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• https://www.defensenews.com/air/2022/09/27/the-air-force-wants-to-start-delivering-ngad-by-2030-can-it-be-done/
• https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/ngad-fighter/
• https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a43250851/air-force-wants-200-sixth-generation-ngad-fighter-jets/
• https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/new-next-generation-air-dominance-fighter-renderings-from-lockheed
• https://warriormaven.com/air/navy-air-force-6th-gen-f22-f35
• https://breakingdefense.com/2023/03/air-force-plans-nominal-buy-of-200-ngad-fighters-1000-drone-wingmen-kendall-says/
• https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/5/8/air-force-fleshing-out-key-component-of-ngad-program
• https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/03/ngad-the-6th-generation-stealth-fighter-that-could-change-everything/
• https://aviationweek.com/special-topics/air-dominance/nearly-decade-long-story-led-ngad-flight-demonstrator
• https://www.defensenews.com/air/2021/07/09/how-two-f-16s-from-the-air-forces-boneyard-will-find-a-second-life-as-the-digital-model-for-the-fleet/
• https://breakingdefense.com/2021/07/digital-design-revolution-key-to-all-domain-ops-air-space-officials-say/
• Hero image source by Department for Science, Innovation & Technology / openverse, by.

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