USAF Chief of Staff reveals further NGAD details
May 16, 2025
The USAF plans to procure a planned fleet of more than 185 Boeing F-47 air superiority fighters (the same number given for today’s F-22 fleet). These will feature a top speed of more than Mach 2, and ‘stealth++’, compared to the F-35’s ‘stealth’ and the F-22’s ‘Stealth+’ The aircraft is to have a combat radius of greater than 1,000 nm. This is impressive, though it is less than the combat radius of the Anglo/Italian/Japanese GCAP, which has been estimated at between 1200-1600 nm. It is, however, significantly greater than the 400 nm unrefuelled mission radius of the Lockheed Martin F-16, the 590 nm radius of the Lockheed Martin F-22, the 670 nm radius of the Lockheed Martin F-35 and the 690 nm radius of the Boeing F-15EX.
Interestingly, the radius of the YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A was given as 700 nm, while top speed was described as ‘classified’, raising all sorts of questions as to how these will operate alongside the F-47, and casting some doubt on their ablity to loiter well forward in the battlespace. There are also questions as to how the USAF will project air dominance in the enemy’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) bubble, with the Chinese A2/AD envelope predicted to extend out to 1,000 miles by 2030.
The graphic showed that the F-47 is intended to be ‘operational’ between 2025 and 2029 – an almost impossibly ambitious target, given that the aircraft is only expected to make its first flight “by the end of the decade.”
The US Air Force has said that: “The F-47 will fly during this Administration,” but has not provided any clarification as to when the aircraft would become formally operational.
Democrat Senator Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, was quoted by Breaking Defense as having “acknowledged that the previous Air Force leaders had already put in a lot of work maturing the sixth-generation fighter,” but that he would be “surprised” if it was “rolled out operationally in two years,” since the defence industrial base was “not as robust as it was many years ago.”
“Our US Air Force will continue to be the world’s best example of speed, agility, and lethality. Modernization means fielding a collection of assets that provide unique dilemmas for adversaries—matching capabilities to threats—while keeping us on the right side of the cost curve,” Allvin wrote.
