CNN
—
President Donald Trump announced the Pentagon’s decision to move forward with a next-generation fighter jet titled F-47 on Friday in joint remarks alongside Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth from the Oval Office.
“At my direction, the United States Air Force is moving forward with the world’s first sixth-generation fighter jet, number six, sixth generation, nothing in the world comes even close to it, and it’ll be known as the F-47,” Trump said.
Trump announced that Boeing had been awarded the contract for the newest US fighter aircraft.
The president went on to say an experimental version of the F-47 has been flying for almost five years. At the end of the first Trump administration, the Air Force acknowledged that it had flown a full-scale prototype of the jet.
“After a rigorous and thorough competition between some of America’s top aerospace companies, the Air Force is going to be awarding the contract for the next generation air dominance platform to Boeing,” Trump announced.
Until now, the program had been known as Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD). But in an apparent reference to his own presidency, Trump said the aircraft would be known as the F-47. Aircraft designations are normally announced by the Air Force.
“It’s something the likes of which nobody has seen before,” Trump said, “and this has been in the works for a long period of time.”
Trump also promised the F-47 would be able to cooperate with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are a major focus of the military, especially as the US has watched Ukraine and Russia effectively use drones in relatively inexpensive long-range attacks and employed drone swarms to overwhelm aerial defenses.
“This plane flies with drones. It flies with many, many drones, as many as you want,” Trump said. “It’s a technology that’s new, but it doesn’t fly by itself. It flies with many drones, as many as you want, and that’s something that no other plane can do.”
It was the Air Force’s decision to award the F-47 program to Boeing, but Trump’s celebration of the announcement was somewhat of a surprise, since he has repeatedly criticized the company.
Trump has railed against Boeing for the cost overruns and delays with the next Air Force One. “We are getting a new Air Force One, if Boeing could ever finish the damn thing,” Trump said in February. Boeing’s leadership said they would try to move the delivery schedule up, but there’s “no silver bullet” for the program.
Another major Boeing program for the Air Force – the KC-46 tanker – is projected to be more than seven years behind its original timeline for reaching full-rate production, according to the Government Accountability Office, a far cry from the Trump administration’s goal of producing systems faster and more efficiently.
For decades, Boeing produced the backbone of the US bomber fleet, from B-17s and B-29s in World War II to B-52s that rolled off the assembly line in the 1960s and are still flying today. Boeing now produces the F-15EX Eagle and F/A-18 Super Hornet, two major platforms for the Air Force and the Navy, respectively.
Late-last year, the Air Force paused the decision on how to proceed with the sixth-generation fighter. The Air Force said in December that then-Secretary Frank Kendall would defer the decision to the Trump administration.
The Next Generation Air Dominance program is intended to produce the US military’s sixth-generation fighter jet, newer and more advanced than the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, which has suffered from major cost overruns and delays.
Elon Musk has railed against the F-35, instead advocating for unmanned drone swarms as a cheaper, more effective weapon. On social media in November, Musk said “Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.”
When Lockheed Martin was awarded the F-35 in October 2001, the weapons maker said the program would cost approximately $200 billion. The company’s CEO promised the F-35 would be “capable and affordable” and be produced “on schedule and cost.” More than two decades later, the total cost of the program has exceeded $2 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), as the military services “plan to use it less.”
