F-47 FIGHTERBolt from the Blue: What We Know (and Don’t Know) About the U.S. Powerful F-47 Fighter
When the F-47 enters service, at a date to be disclosed, it will be a new factor in US air warfare. The design will have much more range than earlier fighters, both at supersonic and subsonic speed. But it is not even a fighter as it is generally understood. It will be more stealthy. It will be larger, trading dogfight maneuverability for reach, and it will be designed to work within a family of systems, many of them unmanned.
When the F-47 enters service, at a date to be disclosed, it will be a new factor in US air warfare.
A decision to proceed with development, deferred since July, was unexpectedly announced on 21 March. Boeing will be the prime contractor.
The design will have much more range than earlier fighters, both at supersonic and subsonic speed. But it is not even a fighter as it is generally understood. It will be more stealthy. It will be larger, trading dogfight maneuverability for reach, and it will be designed to work within a family of systems, many of them unmanned.
Range and speed are defensive attributes, allowing the aircraft to be based farther from Chinese air and missile bases and keeping tankers at a greater distance from interceptors: the air force has backed away from trying to make a more survivable tanker. But range and speed are offensive characteristics, too: while no aircraft can be in two places at once, fast and long-range aircraft can cover a wide area and sustain high sortie rates.
The F-47 is the centerpiece of the US Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) effort. The intended fighter design, now the F-47, has also been called NGAD. And the name Penetrating Counter-Air has been attached to it, too.
Former secretary of the air force Frank Kendall characterized NGAD as large and costly, and the F-47 will have retained these attributes. Although Kendall and USAF chief of staff General Dave Allvin raised the idea of a less costly NGAD last year, it never got near the stage of an amendment to the initial request for proposals that was issued in 2023.
Stealth: the F-22 and F-35 are classic applications of bowtie stealth design, their vertical tails causing stronger radar reflections when viewed from the side than from in front or behind. (A graph of this looks like a bowtie.) The problem in the Western Pacific is China’s numerous long-range airborne radars and air-warfare destroyers, which make it next to impossible to avoid being illuminated from all angles.
Expanding the envelope of tailless flight in terms of speed and maneuverability was almost certainly a focus of the classified Aerospace Innovation Initiative (AII) demonstration program that led to Boeing and Lockheed Martin AII-X prototypes. (AII was run by the Aerospace Projects Office, specially established within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.)
