US Air Force selects 6th generation fighter aircraft under the NGAD program

The US Air Force has started the process of selecting the 6th generation fighter aircraft. The plan assumes that by the end of 2024 a contract will be signed for the development and production of a future-oriented machine, created as a result of the NGAD program. This aircraft will set the direction of development of American aviation for the coming decades.

NGAD (Next Generation Air Dominance) is a program of the US Air Force, assuming the construction of the successor to the F-22 Raptor aircraft. The retirement of the oldest copies has already begun, and according to American forecasts, the F-22, still considered a superplane dominating over any potential opponent, will lose its advantage around 2030.

Until then, the American Air Force wants to have a new generation machine that will again – despite global technological development – give the US an advantage over a potential adversary.

The rest of the article under the video

This role is primarily attributed to China, and it is Chinese armaments, including the development of new aircraft structures, that pose the greatest challenge for the US. Therefore, when designing a new aircraft, the Americans do not talk about a specific machine, but about a “family of systems” that provide air superiority.

The NGAD platform is to be its “essential element”, and the selection of a specific solution and signing of the contract with the manufacturer is to take place – according to “Air&Space Forces Magazine” – by the end of 2024.

“NGAD will have features such as enhanced combat effectiveness, survivability, interoperability and air-to-air adaptability, all in a demanding environment. No one will do it better than the USAF, but we will lose our edge if we we will not move forward,” said US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.

Unlike the F-22, which was created as an air superiority fighter, and only over time gained a limited ability to attack ground targets, the NGAD – although it is supposed to dominate in the air – is intended to be a universal machine from the beginning.

According to the statement of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Charles Q. Brown, the new platform is to provide “certain possibilities” of attacking ground targets, and above all, the possibility of penetrating and destroying enemy air defenses.

Modern combat aircraft are extremely long-lived structures. From the beginning of the design, through the construction and flying of the prototype, the adoption of a given model for service and reaching combat readiness, it sometimes takes even a dozen or so years.

This time is systematically longer – during the Second World War, the designs were already several years old, and during the Cold War, new models often entered service at intervals of only a few years.

Meanwhile, the still-production F-15 took to the air for the first time in 1972, the F-16 in 1974, the Su-27 and MiG-29 in 1977, the Rafale in 1986, and the Gripen in 1988. The youngest of these The Eurofighter first flew in 1994 – 29 years ago!

Regarded as modern aircraft, they are often over 40 years old. Although subsequent modernizations improve their avionics and various types of equipment, sometimes radically increasing combat capabilities, the airframe itself responds to the needs defined decades earlier, which do not always remain valid.

A good example is the F-22 Raptor. Although it is widely recognized as a superplane with an advantage over any opponent (which may still be true!), it is a design that is over 30 years old. It was developed in the 1980s, the prototype took to the air in 1990, and the aircraft became operational in 2005 – 18 years ago.

This shows the advantage that the US has gained over the rest of the world in the field of aviation, but at the same time reveals the scale of the problem: technological development is so fast that the aircraft of the future must evolve and adapt to new conditions much faster than current designs.

An attempt to solve this situation was the proposed introduction of a short, 8-12-year life cycle for new aircraft, but this was considered not prospective. The solution is to be the open architecture of the NGAD platform. Although this increases the cost of purchasing a single copy, it is expected to bring savings over the entire life cycle of the aircraft.

As “Air&Space Forces Magazine” notes, the current practice in the air force was to reduce the cost of subsequent aircraft models as much as possible – their manufacturers were to earn, above all, in the long term, on the maintenance and servicing of the machines sold. The competition therefore ended at the stage of selecting the prototype.

In the case of the NGAD program, there is a departure from that concept. According to Secretary Kendall, the plane could cost up to several hundred million dollars – several times more than the F-35.

The new machine is to have an open architecture, allowing – after its implementation into service – competition in the field of maintenance and modernization of the machines in use. According to the Americans, this will allow for a significant reduction in operating costs.

Space for competing solutions is also created by the idea that NGAD will be created in two versions, intended for the European and Pacific theater of operations. This is due to the fact that these regions of the world impose different, sometimes mutually exclusive features on combat machines.

In the battles over the Pacific, the range and high autonomy of individual machines may turn out to be crucial. These characteristics are of less importance in Europe, where the distances traveled on tasks are likely to be shorter.