Podcast: NGAD Win Puts Boeing Back In The Game With The F-47

What does Boeing’s contract win for the U.S. Air Force’s next-generation combat aircraft, the F-47, mean for the struggling aerospace company? Join Aviation Week’s Robert Wall, Steve Trimble and Matt Jouppi as they dissect the announcement. 

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Transcript:

Robert Wall: Welcome to this emergency Check 6 podcast, “Scramble the F-47” edition, where we discuss the White House announcement that Boeing will build the U.S. Air Force's Next Generation Air Dominance fighter. As you all know, the Air Force was going to award the contract last year, then went somewhat cold on the idea, and the Biden administration left it to the Trump administration to decide the way forward. Well, after some heavy lobbying by the Air Force and industry, we have a winner: Boeing.

With me to discuss what it all means, still somewhat buzzing from the jet fumes of the announcement, are Aviation Week's Senior Defense Editor Steve Trimble, and Matt Jouppi, our Senior Analyst for Military Programs. I'm Robert Wall, Aviation Week's Executive Editor for Defense and Space and your host for today, and I've not been this excited about a fighter announcement, well, since the last one when Lockheed beat Boeing for the Joint Strike Fighter program.

So Steve, why don't you tell our audience what you think it all means?

Steve Trimble: Yes, now I remember. That was October 26th, 2001, I think, for the F-35, and now we have March 21st, 2025 for the F-47.

Robert Wall: F-47.

Steve Trimble: Yes, yes, and we'll find out what its nickname is probably in a few years. But yeah, boy, this is huge and kind of unexpected I think is fair to say. Starting the week, we certainly had no idea this was going to happen. We started getting some hints and some rumblings yesterday evening that something was afoot and could come out today. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened. And this means that yeah, Boeing is going to develop this new fighter for the Air Force.

I say fighter in loose terms because a tactical combat aircraft is probably the best way of saying it. I think when we finally see the full breadth of it, it will challenge our traditional definition of what a fighter is supposed to look like and what it does, but that means that Lockheed Martin lost the competition. They’ve still got the F-35. Its future with the U.S. program of record is still a little bit uncertain until we see the first budget submitted by this version of the Trump administration. That's supposed to come out in a couple months.

But in the meantime, Boeing's got this new fighter development program. They've been preparing for it and spending a lot of money on the infrastructure for this. I went out to St. Louis last June and saw this construction site of this $1.8 billion investment they were making in a new advanced combat aircraft production facility that was going to produce this aircraft. They couldn't say that explicitly, but it was pretty clear that that was the opportunity that they were pursuing.

This is a huge thing for Boeing, right? I mean, their defense and space business have really been struggling, I think it's fair to say. They've reported over $18 billion in reach-forward losses on the five fixed-price development programs that they signed up for in the previous decade, and that's really hurt them. They've also had severe execution problems with Air Force One, with T-7, with MQ-25, obviously with commercial crew, and a lot of other things.

So this program allows them to kind of start with a clean slate and take some of those digital engineering practices that they've been struggling to implement successfully on the T-7 and MQ-25 and extrapolate that on this clean sheet of paper with the lessons learned they already have. So if you want to take the positive or the optimistic outlook for this, this is a chance for them to redeem themselves with the kind of investment from the Air Force that can really make a difference.

Robert Wall: So cement themselves in the fighter business for, potentially for decades to come, right? Because the F-15EX is a sweet airplane, but it also doesn't have probably a lot of production life left.

Steve Trimble: No. And really, ever since that moment in October of 2001 when the X-32 lost, the question has always hovered over St. Louis, how long can they keep this going?

I think if you had asked people in St. Louis, the employees there, in 2009 or 2010 if they thought they were still going to have an F-15 and an F/A-18 line still active in 2025, they would've looked at you pretty funny. But sure enough, I mean, Boeing was able to sustain F/A-18E/F through new buys from the U.S. Navy, and for the F-15, they were able to incrementally modernize it through the Saudi order, which added fly-by-wire, a couple other things, and the Qatari order which added this new cockpit station, and now with the F-15EX, they're adding a new electronic warfare system, that's also going in F-15EX.

So they've been able to keep that going, but really, the clock was ticking on both those programs. We know the Super Hornet is shutting down in a couple of years. F-15EX, we just don't know how much farther that can go, but now they've got this new aircraft that they can build. There's still a Navy competition, by the way. I mean, that's still out there. That's the F/A-XX and Boeing is definitely still in competition for that with Northrop Grumman. We found out Lockheed Martin has dropped out of that competition, but it's still very much in competition.

Where it stands now after this NGAD order, we're not really sure. I would've thought that that might've actually gone to a contract award first, but I guess the Air Force was able to jump ahead of the queue or reassert its place in the line because they put their program on hold for nine months to do this big review that concluded that, in fact, everything that they had originally assumed and thought about this aircraft is exactly correct. So they went on this very circuitous loop for nine months to wind up where we are.

So that's the big thing, I think, on the industrial side. It's a huge opportunity for Boeing, but it also means they got to get this right. They cannot afford to go through what they've been through on those other programs. They have a different CEO and a different leadership structure in place now. So hopefully this is the opportunity for them to redeem themselves, get their feet back, have this huge investment now in their engineering and their digital engineering and manufacturing capabilities that maybe they can even apply on a commercial side. That's beyond the scope of this podcast, but it's really significant for Boeing. So, that's going on.

But then, of course, we've got a new aircraft too, and we even got a little bit of a peek at it. They showed just a hint of its outer mold line, especially the Ford fuselage, a bit of the wing, and the nose landing gear, which was quite exciting if you're into that kind of thing.

Robert Wall: And it's very much not the ugly duckling that the X-32 was since you did mention that airplane.

Steve Trimble: We don't know that yet. I have to reserve judgment until I see the rest of the aircraft. I still haven't seen the inlets. And remember, the inlet on the X-32 is really the biggest problem with that thing. Man, I have a personal hatred of dorsal inlets, top-mounted inlets. I just don't like them. I don't like to see them on aircraft. I know why they put them there and why sometimes it's really important, but I prefer, especially with a fighter, that they're not on it. It's one of the reasons why I hate the J-36 that China unveiled back in December, but I am interested in what Matt Jouppi thinks about what we saw today.

Robert Wall: Absolutely.

Steve Trimble: This little glimpse, the sliver of what this aircraft looks like. And what'd you take away from it, Matt?

Matt Jouppi: Well, Steve and I were trying to discuss possible features, and I mean, you can see some very typical stealth features, very prominent chine line, planform alignment between the nose and the wings, curved fuselage there. And perhaps given the intentionally limited picture there that's not showing key features like the intake design, the rear quarter, engine views and such, perhaps looking at its heritage as a way to infer some details.

And so Boeing really started to get into low observables in the 1980s and this would really mark the first proper Boeing LO platform to enter U.S. service in a production configuration. Boeing has a very long, distinguished history of demonstrators and concepts, but this would really mark a first and a key figure in that capability configuration journey is Alan Wiechman who helped with Bird of Prey, the X-36, reportedly also with the Next-Generation Bomber demonstrator, which flew in the 2000s, and so it'd be interesting to see if some of his legacy may indeed end up on this platform.

Steve Trimble: Well, the thing that struck me also was that radome, the nose. What did you see there?

Matt Jouppi: It does have a very interesting nose that kind of reminds me of the X-36, a little bit of some of the Northrop YF-23 earlier configuration, platypus nose-type arrangement, but it's obviously intentionally difficult to see at this point broader details. Also, the canopy is quite large from the image.

Robert Wall: What should we read into the radome shaping? Do you think it's a sign of a fairly sizable array that it's masking?

Steve Trimble: Well, that's the interesting thing about it. So obviously, what you want, all fighters up until now, or maybe even now as well, are shaped by that radar that goes in the front of the aircraft and you want to make that that radome as big as possible. This radome is even bigger and it's wider. It's like twice the width proportionately that you would expect. These are very general numbers and just sort of a feel for it, but it does give you incredible space in that radome for an array that I would imagine would be multifunctional. So not just a radar or an array for just doing what a radar does, but also for communications, for jamming, for electronic warfare.

But the big surprise for me with that was that I know we're going to gallium nitride semiconductors now. So previous radars and active electronically scanned arrays like you'd see on an aircraft like this have all had gallium arsenide in the past. And the shift to gallium nitride gives you so much more power throughput and temperature capacity, thermal capacity on those arrays, so you can get so much more energy out of the same space. And I thought that that was going to open up the design space for an aircraft like NGAD where you could distribute the array around the aircraft, you could have smaller arrays but still get the same amount of power, and you could have them in different places. Maybe they're still doing that, but it's still amazing to see what could be this real estate for this massive array right at the front of the aircraft.

Now, again, it's very speculative and I don't know what's inside that radome, who knows what's inside there, but if you look at just the way we do these things in the past and if that's going forward, that's a lot of real estate for a big array, radio-frequency-type array.

The other thing that really... I mean, so when you think about what they want to do with the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter, they want to penetrate aerospace, heavily contested aerospace that's very, very far away. So they are trying to make this aircraft competitive and useful in the Indo-Pacific, and so it's got to take off from Guam or it's got to take off from ADAC or something like that and be able to penetrate inside this hostile airspace that's being surveilled and tracked. And so it's got to be stealthy, stealthy enough to slip through even to things like the JY-27A, which is the Chinese 3-D VHF AESA radar, and other radar arrays that they have like that. So that would drive you typically to a design that does not have a vertical stabilizer, just like the B-21. But you also really want to go fast because it's a tactical aircraft, so you want to get in and out very quickly. B-21 is subsonic, so this thing is going to have supersonic speed.

I think President Trump, in his remarks, said something like, "It was going to be able to do two," I think is how he worded it. I'm assuming he's saying Mach 2, and that's kind of F-22 speed. It's faster than an F-35 and way faster than a B-21. That gives you an idea of what it would need. In that case, it would benefit from the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion program. So these new adaptive engines that have the three-stream architecture with a secondary variable bypass flow to increase the fuel efficiency during cruise mode that you can shut off and go much faster, accelerate when you want to.

So those are some of the other features that you could want, but again, it's going to be... You can't really tell that from that shot, but this should be a really big aircraft because it's going to have to carry a lot of its own fuel to go these very long distances, and aircraft cost is measured by the pound, right? So the bigger an aircraft is, the more it weighs, the more it costs to build and deliver.

Robert Wall: I just want to pick on Matt here. What is the next thing you are looking for? Either if we get a clearer image or what is the big questions you have as we see where this goes here in the next coming weeks, maybe months?

Matt Jouppi: I think that the inlet placement would be huge as far as determining what the CONOPS of this potential aircraft is, and I think more so than the vague generational discussion, what's more helpful is to try to figure out a unified CONOPS because if you look at the U.S. JROC JCIDS process of how you establish a program's requirements and what the end result is as far as capability, that's very much mission, flows from the mission.

And so for the ATF, which became F-22, concept of operations, they thought in the '80s that a combination of low observability, supercruise, maneuverability, and high-altitude operation would be mutually supporting elements, along with sensor fusion, to give first-look, first-shot, first-kill capability, and to markedly improve the survivability of the end platform, and moving that forward to today's threat environment and the geography, as Steve was talking about, how many of those core capabilities are relevant?

And I think many of them still are foundationally relevant. Supercruise is particularly relevant if they're being based further afield in those second island chain kind of areas. But obviously, low observability has changed enormously over the past 40 years, having to deal with those new radar types that Steve was talking about, VHF, all-aspect stealth threats. With new sensor fusion, we're talking about new gallium nitride arrays, multifunction arrays, passive AMTI possibilities going forward. I think another interesting thing is at least I didn't see any kind of IRST or kind of EO/IR apertures present on the picture.

Steve, did you think the landing gear was particularly robust or do you have any conclusions about that?

Steve Trimble: Yeah, I didn't really look at it too hard, so I don't know. At least the landing gear, no. So it definitely is a single-wheel landing gear like you would expect from an Air Force aircraft, but no, I didn't make any solid judgments on it.

There is a new photo that's been released that I'm just looking at and it gives you a better view of the frontal section. Again, it looks like the aft section is obscured in this sort of cloud, but it still doesn't look like it has vertical stabilizers. I think that the key thing though is that it's not a Delta, it's not like the... Or the Ginkgo leaf, like the J-36 configuration.

Robert Wall: Does it look a bit in the back, I mean, I could be wrong here, but does it almost reminds one a bit of the McDonnell Douglas JAST concept a bit?

Steve Trimble: JAST? Yeah, yeah. I can see that. I can see that. Well, and of course that did have vertical stabilizers, although heavily canted, much more canted than the X-35 or X-32. But yeah, it's a little too unclear at this point to say that definitively, but I doubt it will have vertical stabilizers. I could say that anyway. We're just looking at it, really, so no firm conclusions yet on it, but it's fascinating.

Robert Wall: Yeah. Well, I mean, also interesting more at a high level, I guess, just to zoom out for a second, I mean, it is kind of incredible. We now really have arguably all the legs of the Air Force's future combat aircraft fleet defined. Well, at least the initial iteration because we have the B-21, obviously, in development and flying. We've got at least the first round of the CCAs awarded now and in development and probably due to fly this year, and now we have the F-47. And I realize there's more CCAs to come, but it is kind of remarkable, to me at least.

Steve, are you a bit more skeptical?

Steve Trimble: Well, only on the CCA part. So right now, the first increment of the prototypes are awarded, but the Air Force, up to this point, has said that they are willing to go back into competition for the production Increment 1 aircraft with completely different designs, if possible. I don't think that's likely necessarily, so you can't really definitively say that those Increment 1 prototypes are the Increment 1 CCAs.

But we also don't know, because of the way the CCA program is set up is that they could start those Increment 1 prototypes and then go, "You know what? That's not what we want to do," I'm not saying that that's what they're going to do, but that is an option for them, and then just go to Increment 2. And whatever they decide for Increment 2, which can have completely different requirements, different cost structure, different performance, all these things, and none of those requirements are set, or if they have been set, they have not been released yet.

So we don't know where they're going with Increment 2, and then of course, two years later they go to Increment 3. At least that was the original plan. The Trump administration can change all that, right? But it does seem like the military leadership of the Air Force, that's still what they want. They want this variable and constantly evolving set of options for that aircraft family. So by definition almost, we will never really be able to say that we know exactly what the CCAs are going to be.

I just have a feeling Increment 1 isn't really where the Air Force wants to stay. I think they have very different ideas for Increment 2 and Increment 3, so we'll see how that goes. But yes, between B-21 and F-47 anyway now, we have a very good picture of where that 2030s, mid-2030s Air Force fleet, what that's going to look like.

Robert Wall: And are we assuming it's F-47 because 47th president or is that...

Steve Trimble: So you know, it's interesting where we're going with these designations. Honestly, it should be the F-25 in a sane world because the F-35 should have been the F-24, but there was a mix-up when they announced the contract and it became the F-35. And then they announced the first Increment 1 CCAs were going to be the YFQ-42 and I think it was the YFQ-44. And so usually, if you do have that, then there's F-43 in there somewhere, there's an F-45, an F-46, and then you get to F-47.

It is possible that... Who knows with this administration? It's possible they could have just bypassed that and gone to F-47 to make it align with Trump's place in the history of presidents, or the aviation journalist, the military aviation journalist in me would really like to know if that spot, those F-45 and F-46 were assigned to the operational prototypes that probably preceded this award, or maybe those were the F-40 and F-41. I mean, a YF-40 and YF-41 or something like that. And of course, there's the Navy demonstrators that are probably out there too, and maybe they got a designation too.

So I can't say that definitively. It is suspicious, I would say, that F-47 got picked for that. I'm sure the Russians are going like, "Hey, we already took that designation for a fighter back with the Berkut," but they didn't put into production. As cool as that forward-swept wing concept was, I don't think they can feasibly lay claim to something that they never actually produced.

Robert Wall: All right. Matt, any parting shots from you?

Matt Jouppi: No, I think it is interesting though on Steve's thoughts about CCA as far as the Aerospace Innovation Initiative, which helped birth this thing way back in the day, which Kendall was part of. That CCA concept really came quite a bit later from that. So it'll be interesting to see, with the Air Force really being undecided on Increment 2, for CCA, they're deferring the Next-Generation Aerial Refueling System discussion. It really seems that they've refocused on NGAD as being the most important thing that they're going to be focusing on for Next Generation Air Dominance going forward.

And so we'll have to wait and see, I think, probably to see if they clear up their how does the unmanned compliment picture fit on this? Because they've gone back and forth on do they want Increment 2 to be more exquisite, less exquisite? Industry has their own thoughts about that right now as well.

Steve Trimble: Yep.

Robert Wall: Right. All right. Well, what you just said reminds me of the phrase, "The quarterback of the digital battlefield." Let's hope this one has a better future than Comanche did, and with that, maybe we'll wrap it for now.

Matt and Steve, thanks so much for jumping on the breaking news. Also, a special thanks to our podcast producer, Andrea Copley-Smith, for your support, especially on very short notice. And of course, thanks to our audience for your time and attention. And as ever, please check back soon for another episode of Check 6, maybe on the F/A-XX award?