Editor’s note: This is a developing story.
The Pentagon has awarded the long-awaited contract for the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance future fighter jet, known as NGAD, to Boeing, President Donald Trump announced Friday.
The sixth-generation fighter, which will replace the F-22 Raptor, will be designated the F-47, Trump said. It will have “state-of-the-art stealth technologies [making it] virtually unseeable,” and will fly alongside multiple autonomous drone wingmen known as collaborative combat aircraft.
“It’s something the likes of which nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said in an Oval Office announcement with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin and Lt. Gen. Dale White, the Air Force’s military deputy for acquisition, technology and logistics. “In terms of all the attributes of a fighter jet, there’s never been anything even close to it, from speed to maneuverability to what it can have [as] payload. And this has been in the works for a long period of time.”
“America’s enemies will never see it coming,” he continued.
The competition for NGAD was between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, after Northrop Grumman announced in 2023 that it would not compete for the program as a prime contractor.
A statement from Boeing was not immediately available.
Allvin said in a statement Friday that experimental versions of the NGAD have been flying for the last five years, “flying hundreds of hours, testing cutting-edge concepts and proving that we can push the envelope of technology with confidence.”
Allvin said the significant advance experimentation and work on the F-47 will allow the service to fly the jet by the end of Trump’s administration.
“The F-47 has unprecedented maturity,” Allvin said. “While the F-22 is currently the finest air superiority fighter in the world, and its modernization will make it even better, the F-47 is a generational leap forward. The maturity of the aircraft at this phase in the program confirms its readiness to dominate the future fight.”
Allvin said the F-47 would cost less than the F-22 and “be more adaptable to future threats,” and that the Air Force will have more NGAD fighters in its fleet than Raptors. The Air Force now has about 180 F-22s which cost $143 million apiece.
Trump declined to reveal the price of NGAD, saying that would reveal some of the jet’s highly classified technology and size.
The price of NGAD has presented a major vulnerability to the program, one which placed it in jeopardy last year. Former Air Force Sec. Frank Kendall paused the program in July 2024 after cost estimates came in around triple that of the F-35, or as much as $300 million per tail.
Trump also left the door open to selling versions of NGAD to allies — though he said those might be “toned-down” versions.
“Because someday, maybe they’re not our allies, right?” Trump said.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
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