The new engine is a larger version of an engine originally created for an improved the F35. The Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP) ran for seven years and was making an engine that would be 30% more fuel efficient but with 20% more thrust. AETP ran for about seven years but failed to deliver the new engine for the F35.
The Air Force chose to minimize the cost and effort to make the F35 acceptable and is shifting money and effort to rapidly deliver the NGAD. The entire F35 development program was flawed as there were too many conflicting requirements. The Air Force, Navy and Marines all had to make different versions of the F35 and this made the F35A, F35B and F35C all more complicated, compromised and costly.
A well run NGAD program can ideally used the improved technology that is ready and make a more effective fighter that only has to meet US Air Force requirements.
Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion, or NGAP, is the engine that will be used in the 6th generation fighter. The company to make the engine will be either GE or Pratt & Whitney and the Air Force will choose the supplier in 2024. The Air Force will also select the company that will make the NGAD fighter in 2024. The NGAD fighter maker will be either Lockheed or Boeing.
NGAP will go into prototyping and testing from 2024-2028. The plan is to have the NGAP engine and NGAD fighter ready by 2030.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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You folks had best get off your proverbial duffs a day get done with all the reviews and other hoopla that delays everything we try to do in this country endlessly. Not just engine, fighters and bombers but all things technical, spaceflight or on or beneath the sea. Delays and meeting, which cause delays, drive schedule and cost hopelessly to the right. Are you all blind to what China is doing along with Putins cronies. Not to mention Iraq, and sorry a.. Ping Pong in N. Korea????? You DC types best get off you high hill you sit on and get things done and do it together, as one country rather than constantly arguing over each and every thing the comes. Bickering and a cesspool of personal interests have to stop. Either get it done or go back to where you come from and sit on your own porch and b…h at your neighbors please!!!
We have to quit wringing hands over nothing. Do something which for God sakes includes keeping a secrete. Seems we have lost the ability to shut up and DO, then brag about it. Not vice versa. China knows what we’re going to do before we do or they would still be steeling using design for planes and using old ramp decks to launch planes at see. If secrets are divulged find who did it and put them in a deep dark hole. Secure our information and that means all forms.
We can’t build nuke power plants because it is just law suits, delays, cost overruns and Yada Yada endlessly also smothered by meetings where attendees go on endlessly about delays and cost for days at a time all the while, complaint why it is all happening. Could it be that everyone is in a meeting. I’ve been there. It sucks. Then when finally done late and triple the budget, the fools who let it all go to H..l in a handbasket get huge bonuses. It’s just hard to believe this happens over and over like a big game.
Get a grip people!!!
It was a short sighted choice to do the F-35 engine evolution upgrade rather than the big AETP jump, considering the increasing performance ans secondary demands being imposed on that airframe. At least the work got far enough to have a candidate engine for that though, that will form the core of NGAP. Wonder if NGAP will flow into F/A-XX or PCA as well?
In other news, Rolls Royce is getting out of the electric aviation business and allegedly going “all in” on sustainable aviation fuels, aka greenwashing. I wonder if that will extend to their generator work for hybrid electric aviation drivetrains?
Never let perfection get in way of production”