America’s NGAD fighter isn’t dead, but it is changing

America’s new stealth fighter, being developed under the name Next Generation Air Dominance (or NGAD), is not being canceled but will be redesigned to bring costs down and better integrate the new aircraft with its AI-enabled drone wingmen that are also in development.

After a decade of development, the future of what many have called the world’s first 6th-generation fighter was suddenly called into question in recent weeks as the Air Force struggles to fund a laundry list of high-dollar modernization programs, including a new stealth bomber in the B-21 Raider, and a new nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile in the LGM-35A Sentinel program.

However, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has told Defense News that the effort to field a new stealth fighter is not dead, but will see changes – including the possibility of using a less complex engine than the new adaptive cycle powerplants that have been in development for this new fighter.

“The family of systems concept of Next Generation Air Dominance is alive and well,” Kendall told Defense News. “I can tell you that we are looking at the NGAD platform design concept to see if it’s the right concept or not. We’re looking at whether we can do something that’s less expensive and do some trade-offs there.”

This news is sure to cause some concern within America’s airpower apparatus. This new fighter, after all, is arguably only in development today because of the seemingly short-sighted decision to cancel production of the F-22 Raptor.

As a cost-saving measure amid the Global War on Terror, America’s current top-tier air superiority fighter saw its production run slashed from 750 fighters to just 186. This doomed the Raptor to a short service life, with ever-increasing operating costs and no way to replace airframes as they age out of service or are lost in combat.

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Despite being the oldest stealth fighter in service today, the F-22 Raptor is still arguably the healthiest and most dominant in air-to-air combat, thanks in no small part to its advanced Pratt & Whitney F119 afterburning turbofan engines that are so powerful they can produce more thrust without their afterburners than the F-15 Eagle can with its afterburners at full tilt. They also offer significant thermal and radar signature reduction for improved stealth, and thrust vector control (or the ability to orient the outflow of thrust independent of the airframe) for improved aerobatic maneuverability.

This advanced engine also serves as the basis for the F-35’s F135 turbofan, which is the most powerful turbofan engine ever affixed to a fighter to date. Yet, over the past year, both China and Russia have begun production on their own seemingly comparable 5th-generation engines, eroding the technological advantage the already endangered F-22 enjoys.

GE and Pratt & Whitney have been hard at work for years developing new engines for America’s new fighter as a part of the Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP), with both of the competing designs promising to offer a significant leap in both fuel economy and power production. And although testing has been promising with these engines (particularly for GE’s XA100), it seems this may be one of the areas the Air Force believes it can reduce costs.

“The last numbers I saw on NGAP [Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion] were pretty high,” retired General Clint Hinote, who was previously in charge of the Air Force Futures organization, told Defense News. “I do think that’s a factor. I don’t know if that’s the only factor, or the factor that’s really contributing to this decision. But it is true that the NGAP program, the development of an adaptive engine for the NGAD, was very costly.”

To be certain, NGAD has always promised to be a very expensive aircraft, with Secretary Kendall himself saying that it will likely ring in at around $300 million per aircraft – roughly three times the F-35’s cost. Alhough, as Sandboxx News has covered in the past, when adjusted for inflation, this isn’t very far off from the price tags of previous top-tier fighters, including the F-22 and F-14, and is less than half the per-unit price of the forthcoming B-21 Raider stealth bomber.

“Ideally, I’d like to get it down to less than an F-35, or at least in the ballpark of an F-35. F-35s, as you know, are not cheap airplanes,” Kendall said.

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