According to Central TV News on September 24, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff David Alvin announced on September 22 local time, The U.S. Air Force¡¯s first sixth-generation F-47 fighter aircraft is currently being manufactured by Boeing and is expected to make its first flight in 2028.

On the 22nd, Boeing Defense released a video related to the U.S. Air Force's latest sixth-generation fighter project F-47 on its social media, with an attachment saying that the new generation of technology will ensure that this fighter "dominates the sky for decades." However, the video was ridiculed by the crowd, and some netizens said that "the AI rendering is doing a good job" and "always painting cakes, never really landing."

Boeing released a video image source: Central TV News

On March 21, local time, US President Trump officially awarded the contract for the U.S. Air Force's "Next Generation Air Advantage (NGAD)" project, namely the U.S. sixth-generation fighter aircraft project.

According to the British "Guardian" report, as the 47th president of the United States, Trump said that the US military named the new generation of fighters F-47. Trump said that the F-47 "uses the most advanced stealth technology" and will be "the most advanced, most powerful and most lethal aircraft in history", which can be put into combat with drones.

Concept map of the U.S. Air Force's first sixth-generation fighter F-47

According to U.S. media reports, the F-47 will replace the F-22 as the U.S. Air Force's sixth-generation main-power air superiority fighter. The unit cost more than 300 million.The value of engineering and manufacturing development contracts alone is more than $20 billion.

As of the close of U.S. stocks on September 23, local time, Boeing was at US $216.346, an increase of 2.01%, and its latest market value was US $163.59 billion.

Boeing Stock Price Trends

Previously reported:

Former US Air Force Secretary reveals secret information: Chinese missiles even prevent F-47s from taking off

According to the U.S. "war zone" website on March 29, former U.S. Air Force Secretary Kendall and former Procurement Secretary Andrew Hunt in the "Air Force podcast" program of "Defense and Aerospace Reports" conducted an interview on the U.S. six-generation F-47 fighter aircraft, talked about the F-47 many secrets.

The two senior Air Force officials said that the U.S. six-generation project ¡°NGAD¡± originated in 2017 during Trump¡¯s first term, with Boeing and Lockheed Martin¡¯s prototypes being made after 2017, first flying ¡°demonstration samples¡± in 2019 and 2022 respectively.

Kender said NGAD was too expensive and the U.S. Air Force did not have enough funding to cut off NGAD, and the subsequent CCA on the unmanned crashing aircraft project led to the idea that drones could replace human aircraft, and because of China¡¯s massive development of hypersonic weapons, Kender believed that neither the F-22, F-35 nor the F-47 could take off in the Pacific battle zone, and he preferred to invest in anti-aircraft defense in the Pacific region.

As for the level of Boeing, which was questioned by the outside world, Kendall confirmed that Boeing won the bid by "bolder design", and the designs of Loma and Northrop Grumman were "too conservative". But Kendall admitted that the specific details of the F-47 program approved by Trump were no different from those when he canceled the NGAD program. He didn't understand why Trump "had the confidence to restart this program."

Boeing (pictured above) and Lockheed Martin's six-generation concept map Kendall calls Loma's concept "too conservative" War Zone website

Part of the original text is translated as follows:

Kender confirmed that the NGAD project originated early in the beginning of the last Trump administration, in 2017. At that time, the Department of Defense¡¯s Advanced Research Programme Agency (DARPA) dominated a project called the Aerospace Innovation Initiative, and was jointly involved by the U.S. Air Force and Navy, with a total investment of $1 billion.

Kender said the "Aviation Innovation Initiative" has two goals, one is to pre-explore "the features of the six-generation aircraft" without the specific indicators of the six-generation aircraft; and the other is to hope that Boeing and Northrop Grumman will participate in the competition of the six-generation aircraft to restart the competition in the tactical aircraft market, because Lockheed Martin has for years almost monopolized the market with F-22 and F-35.

Kendall described that at the beginning of the initiative, the U.S. Air Force did not formulate specific indicators for the sixth-generation aircraft. He said: "At the beginning of the initiative, we had not finalized the configuration, and there were some features we wanted."

The prototypes subsequently made by various companies are also called the ¡°X-Plane¡±. Boeing and Loma¡¯s ¡°X-Plane¡± was built some time after 2017, with first flights in 2019 and 2022, respectively. Kender stressed that these demonstrators were entirely experimental demonstrators and did not reflect ¡°tactical design¡± and not ¡°producing prototypes¡±.

Since the demonstrators did not come to the conclusion of "what is Six Generation", the project decided to expand the scope further. In 2019, the Six Generation project changed its name to NGAD and set up an office. Hunt said: "I think that part of the reason why a new office was set up for advanced aircraft is that NGAD was conceived as a different way to solve problems than in the past, not necessarily looking for something, and not necessarily assuming that the answer is something that looks like a traditional fighter aircraft."

Although the question ¡°what is a six-generation jet?¡± was not answered by the Aviation Innovation Initiative and the NAGD office, Kendall confirmed that the specific indicators for the F-47 were formulated during Trump¡¯s first term, namely, ¡°the next generation of aircraft that surpasses the F-22.¡±

Kender said the initial NGAD fighter demanded mainly to directly replace the F-22 to carry out "entry into dense, highly-protected airspace and be able to penetrate and be able to establish their own air advantage, at least temporarily within enemy territory."

At the same time, the F-47¡¯s technical indicators have unprecedented network capabilities, and the F-47 and the U.S. Navy¡¯s future carrier F/A-XX can more ¡°seamlessly¡± interoperate and operate other assets. At the same time, Kendall wants NGAD to open patents. Because Kendall has always disliked the F-35 project, he bluntly criticized Lockheed Martin¡¯s dominance on the F-35 project, calling it ¡°inappropriate procurement behavior.¡±

But as the project advances, Kendall discovers that the future of NGAD is grey, mainly because NGAD faces three problems:

The first problem is that there is no money. It will cost at least another $20 billion to complete the research and development phase of the project. Without so much money, there would be no NGAD, and within the Air Force funding, there is no place to transfer to NGAD.

The second question was rationality, Kender questioned the question "Is NGAD useful?" and the development of the drone CCA project questioned the core functions of NGAD fighters - expensive drones shouldn't be taken to penetrate enemy air defense, and cheap CCAs for penetration operations seem more reasonable.

But very "coincidentally", recently, the U.S. Air Force suddenly figured it out. Kendall said a "near-term" review of the NGAD fighter program determined that the aircraft would be a key factor in achieving air superiority in the future, especially in high-end combat where the risk of developing NGAD is minimal.

A U.S. Air Force F-16 Fort Theater website in the Pacific region

The third question is very interesting. Kendall described it as an "opportunity cost" problem because the F-47 will face attacks from a large number of Chinese hypersonic weapons and will be "difficult to take off." He's willing to trade NGAD fighter money for investments in new counter-space capabilities and improved base defenses

Kender said: ¡°We need to actively advance the missile defense project. East China has signed dozens or hundreds of satellites aimed at the joint forces and launched long-range shots at the joint forces. So we have to respond to this. China has deployed thousands of weapons to attack U.S. bases, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and high-speed hypersonic missiles. Therefore, having effective, economical defense capabilities is very important ... If we make the operational forces very vulnerable to Chinese space force intelligence-led attacks, if we make our bases vulnerable to attacks, then the F-22s, F-35s and F-47s will never take off.¡±

Overall, Kendall continued to hold on to his skepticism about NGAD. Kender, who suspended the NGAD project last summer and criticized the Trump administration after leaving office, said in this interview that he did not know what weights the Trump administration might have or plan to make when deciding on the F-47. There is no indication that the core design of the F-47 has had any fundamental changes compared to before the suspension.

But when Kendall responded to external questions about Boeing, Kendall said the F-47 was a winner in a ¡°real competition¡± with Boeing and Lockheed Martin proposing a viable, completely different design, even though Kendall said he couldn¡¯t give details.

He added that when it comes to achieving key milestones, one company acts faster than the other, but they all eventually reach the goal, he said: ¡°These aircraft are new designs.¡±

Hunter also noted that current contractors (meaning Loma) tend to be more inclined to avoid risks, while challengers tend to be more inclined to take greater risks, while Nokia had already lost its competitive qualification before the official announced its withdrawal from the bidding in 2023.

But at the end of the interview, Kendall was still complaining about the cost of the F-47: According to Kendall, according to public information, the unit cost of the F-47 is expected to be at least twice as much as the F-35, or between $1.6 billion and $1.8 billion.

Kendall said he doubts whether any U.S. ally or partner is willing to buy the F-47¡¯s export model, the F-47¡¯s cost is too high, and the export is likely to be a ¡°cutting-edge version.¡±Hunt noted that most of the successful U.S. large military procurement projects have indeed reached the point of export sales, while the high forward-looking and maintenance costs of the F-22 have made the F-22 a minority of non-export differences.

At the end of the interview, Kendall felt that it was safe for the U.S. Air Force to choose to continue studying the F-47. He said: "(Some people say) we are not ready to put our confidence entirely on drones at present, right? I tend to agree with this view."