New NGAD Fighter Will Be Bigger, Stealthier and Double the Range of the F-22

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The United States Air Force (USAF) plans to award the contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program and for new fighter engines in 2024. The NGAD is a sixth-generation fighter jet that will replace the F-22 Raptor. The Air Force hopes to have the NGAD in production by the end of the decade.

NGAD will have over twice the range of the F-22 Raptor.

The two main competitors for the contract are: Lockheed Martin, Boeing.

The NGAD will have:
New AESA radar systems
New tailless stealth designs
New adaptive cycle engines
An arsenal of kinetic and laser directed energy weapons
Twin engines that provide greater thrust and fuel efficiency
Minimized heat emissions

The NGAD program is highly classified. The US military does not want to stealth and other technologies to leak to China like the plans and designs for the F-22 and the F-35. The US Air Force is modernizing to increase lethality and ensure air superiority.

According to former Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Anderson, China has stolen F-22 secrets for many years. The J-20 stealth fighter is based on technology from the F-22 Raptor and Joint Strike Fighter program. Data leaks occurred at principal subcontractor Lockheed Martin in 2007.

China’s military technology spy program ranged from advanced cyberattacks to old-fashioned methods such as honey traps and bribes to recruit US contractors, academic researchers, and officials.

26 thoughts on “New NGAD Fighter Will Be Bigger, Stealthier and Double the Range of the F-22”

  2. $1.7T is for the life of the program. Over 40 years that really isn’t that bad of a deal. The F-22 cost at fly away was $177M per copy. Loaded out was closer to $200M, but that’s because the program was cut short. The F-35 is single engine and the F-22 is a dual engine. Otherwise, you’re looking at similar costs. But the armed services know the F-35 program will be somewhere in the order of 2,000-3000 copies of the jet. In the end, economics speaks louder than performance. The United States must be able to balance off the cost of the copy of the judge and the capability of the job. They need to look for low cost ways to do the same thing that you can do with expensive exotic materials and design.

  3. Having 2X the range of a short range fighter is not saying all that much. Anti-ship missiles already can reach the range of a 1000 miles, so you are not getting that much by operating at that limit. You are right on the edge. 0 loiter time. Refueling puts a big strain on your tankers. They can easily be blown out of the sky by a missile truck. You need to somehow extend the range too 1500 MI to keep your aircraft carriers out of harm’s way.

  4. One of the many problems with the F-22A is that it was designed for the European theater, not a long-distance, multi-thousand-mile trek to the enemy’s front door. And the F-35A is not any better suited. More importantly, flying over vast areas of open ocean is not an area where having only one motor is very reassuring in your chances to make it back home.

    You add that to the technology used in the F-22 or the F-35. The two Lockheed Stealth fighters are early to late 1980s designs, mindsets, and technologies. We can do better 40 years on down the road.

    Today, our enemies aren’t at the gate, as far as we know, our brain-dead government isn’t concerned about an attack, except maybe through our porous southern border. So, the name of the game will be both a low observable and one with really long legs. It must be designed with a very large internal fuel volume and a cavernous weapons bay. All items required to take the fight to China or North Korea.

    • The range of the F-22 is 550 mi. That is woefully short of what it needs to be. The range can be extended via external fuel tanks but then you lose its greatest advantage and that is stealth. To cross the continental United States, you would have to refuel a minimum of at least five or six times.

  5. The Air Force tried the delta wing platform with the F102 and F106 fighters as air-to-air interceptors. The plane lost tons of airspeed turning in a dog fight and their engines didn’t produce enough thrust to recover the speed lost. Yet, here we go again with another delta shaped wing for stealth. I understand that it needs the larger wing to carry the extra fuel for longer flights, and that the engines have been redesigned to provide better fuel usage, but maybe we should consider an entirely different engine. To improve stealth, maybe we could develop a better electronic means to divert the radar and light energies painting the plane, making it virtually invisible by the use of cloaking devices. We’ll eventually get there, but more research needs to be done first, so I guess we’ll have to take what we can get in the meantime. The YF23 was a good design, and possibly ahead of its time, but I don’t think it would have been very good in a dogfight either. BTW, I’m an old Vietnam F4 driver.”The Air Combat Tactics Story” © 2013 -About how the “Top Gun” and “Red Flag” programs got their start. (13:12 mins) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7t2RuZxUr0

    • The US DOD no longer considers dogfighting performance a priority. Instead the jets from the F35 and beyond are designed to excel at detecting and firing (missiles) upon airborne targets before the enemy even knows the F35 is there. In fact the B and C versions of the F35 don’t even have an internal canon.

      • Funny. That was the attitude in the late 50’s and 60’s. Missiles will fix everything no need for dogfights, except we did need guns and dogfighting planes. Hope someday those in charge will actually pay attention to history.

    • Thank you for your Service! I was onboard US Destroyer on gunline Vietnam 1972! Those F4’s would buzz us so low we’ed wave at da piolts!

  6. The weird thing is that the dems continues to push insane labor laws as requiring that defense industry, including spacex, by required to hire based on diversity, along with ppl on green cards and/or naturalized.

    The leak by l-mart was caused by multiple naturalized ‘citizens’ that were still loyal to China.

    So , now we have to replace f-22/f-35
    Because the dems force these companies to hire ppl that WILL compromise us.

    • Hey Windbourne who was the president in 2007? Oh yeah Bush a Republican who was more concerned about going to war with countries that never attacked us than China stealing our military secrets. I love how you conservative idiots blame Democrats for things when your Republican idiots are in charge. You know like 9/11, the deficit, the housing crisis, Trump’s failure during the pandemic its amazing how you can reinvent history.

    • The worst breaches of national security before Trump’s Mar a Lago docs for sale treason were by the Walker family vs the US Navy submarine service. The Walkers were active duty navy personnel and Republicans.The second worse breach was by engineers at our “loyal” Japanese industrial partners who sold our top secret computer controlled milling programs for sub propellers to the Russians. Don’t tell me that those engineers were green card Chinese. That’s just right-wing bs.

  8. Hi, a number of good points, my understanding is while the Air force’s NAGAD and Navy’s F/A-XX program are planning to share a number of systems and features, including potential open architecture software. It is likely the NGAD described in the article above being Air Force specific wont have the same size and weight constraints as its Navy FX-XX cousin, for the reasons and limitations you outlined in your comment

  10. 300 Mill a piece, though! The F-35 was already the most expensive military platform ever at 100 Mill a piece and 1,7 Trillion through the entire program’s lifespan! How many Trillions the NGAD will end up costing? Ouch!!

    • $1.7T is for the life of the program. Over 40 years that really isn’t that bad of a deal. The F-22 cost at fly away was $177M per copy. Loaded out was closer to $200M, but that’s because the program was cut short. The F-35 is single engine and the F-22 is a dual engine. Otherwise, you’re looking at similar costs. But the armed services know the F-35 program will be somewhere in the order of 2,000-3000 copies of the jet. In the end, economics speaks louder than performance. The United States must be able to balance off the cost of the copy of the judge and the capability of the job. They need to look for low cost ways to do the same thing that you can do with expensive exotic materials and design.

  11. This seems like the last generation of Battleships or some other weapons tech that was obsolete before being built.

    It seems like a waste of time to put so much attention into weapons delivery systems rather than the smart weapons themselves.

    A cargo plane can dump them out the back like Rapid Dragon. A Starship could drop re-entry boxes from orbit in a similar way and deploy 100 tons of smart weapons anywhere on the planet in less than an hour. Drone fighters could be included, but a manned NGAD is an anachronism. Just like the auto industry should be planning a future without drivers, the Air Force needs to understand there won’t be any more pilots needed.

    • While I do agree with you in part, the same was said about Artillery and Tanks. We can see in Ukraine that these weapons platforms are still necessary.

    • $300 million ? For a country 4 1/2 trillion dollars in debt, how in hell does the United States keep spending and financing all these weapons, and wars all over the world without the dollar collapsing to nothing?

    • The plane isn’t a true analog to the F-22.

      It’s more like a faster, armed E-3, that will command several drone wingmen to go do it’s work.

      It has a pilot (and likely other crew, as many as 4) to keep human-in-the-loop, while not suffering the lag the modern drone pilots experience.

  13. Bigger makes a lot of sense given area vs volume as scale up. Internal weapons bays and 100-1000kW lasers are going to be bulky, and gives options for oversized fuel tanks. With 1000nm 4-5hour range they will need a lot less sorties for patrol operations to increase airframe life (takeoffs+landings are killers) and will be able to consolidate number of bases that operate from and with greater stand-off distances for carrier groups. A lot more scope for projecting power from carriers into continental targets.

    The very clean planform might see a significant reduction in parts count – which is at least as significant for development and manufacturing and maintenance costs as weight is, particularly for a stealth aircraft. Fewer control surface actuators (and aero-surface hinges etc) has to be a win as well.

    Higher mass might be hard work for carrier catapults though, and maybe there will be more space issues for storage within Carriers.

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