The U.S. Air Force plans to award a contract next year for its Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter, the sixth-generation combat aircraft set to replace the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor.
The service announced May 18 it had released a classified solicitation to industry for an engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract for NGAD. The service and industry will not say who is officially in the running for the classified program, though it is widely expected that Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman will compete.
“The NGAD Platform is a vital element of the Air Dominance Family of Systems, which represents a generational leap in technology over the F-22, which it will replace,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in an announcement. “NGAD will include attributes such as enhanced lethality and the abilities to survive, persist, interoperate and adapt in the air domain, all within highly contested operational environments. No one does this better than the U.S. Air Force, but we will lose that edge if we don’t move forward now.”
The announcement comes after months of confusion about where the NGAD program is in its acquisition timeline. Kendall said in June 2022 at a Heritage Foundation event that the service had “now started the EMD program to do the development aircraft that we’re going to take into production.”
That statement prompted the Defense Department Inspector General to open an investigation to determine if the EMD phase had been started too early. In an announcement, the IG said its “objective is to determine the extent to which the Air Force demonstrated that the critical technologies used in the [NGAD] fighter aircraft were mature enough to support entry into the engineering and manufacturing development phase of the NGAD program’s acquisition timeline.”
The IG report has not been released, and Kendall has walked back his statement, saying that while EMD phase had not started, he was expressing that the program is mature based on other risk-reduction activities such as the Aerospace Innovation Initiative under DARPA that started in 2015 to build experimental X planes as technology demonstrators.
That “was designed to reduce the risk in some of the key technologies that we would need in the production program,” Kendall says.
The service has been experimenting with prototypes for years, based on a 2020 comment from then-Air Force Assistant Secretary of Acquisition Will Roper that one had flown, though no update has been provided since.
NGAD will cost “multiple hundreds of millions” per airframe, Kendall has said.
The service is investing heavily in research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) for NGAD. The fiscal 2024 budget request calls for $1.93 billion in RDT&E spending, a total that will rise to $16.2 billion over the next five years.
NGAD will be powered by the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) engine. The budget calls for $220.4 million in RDT&E for this engine, with that number dropping to $0 in 2028, a hint that the program will move into production at that point. GE Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney are developing powerplants for this program, which is the next generation of the engines the companies developed under the Adaptive Engine Transition Program.
A September 2022 contract announcement for the prototype phase of NGAP confirmed the two engine companies and the three aircraft OEMs are in competition. The contracts covered integration work for the new engine.
The Air Force is being tight-lipped about the program as it progresses, saying that additional information on the technical and programmatic details are classified “to protect operational and technological advantages.”
