“We're.surprised there were 18 bidders,” Cowen & Company analyst Roman Schweizer, wrote in a July 24 note to investors. While Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Atomics won contracts, much smaller Kratos, which has been the subject of acquisition speculation, also received a contract. The Air Force in July revealed that it received 18 bids for a new drone that could fly in formation with manned fighter jets. The Virtual Tools That Built the Air Force’s New Fighter Prototype In recent years, the Pentagon writ large has been trying to tap into innovation, particularly commercial technology, that could be adopted for the military. companies that currently build fighter jets.Īnother reason for disclosing the NGAD project: Roper wants companies to invest more in digital design technology.
Lockheed Martin and Boeing are the only two U.S. “It is letting us take aircraft assembly back to where we were in the 70s and prior to it - back when we had 10 or more companies who could build airplanes for the United States Air Force, because you could do it in hangar-like facilities with small, but very good teams, of engineers and mechanics. “Digital engineering is lowering overhead for production and assembly you do not have to have huge facilities, huge workforces expensive tooling,” Roper said on a video conference call with reporters after his presentation. He even declined to name the company or companies that built the jet.īut he said the digital design technology used to build the new plane could increase competition and increase the number of American military jet makers. Roper provided no more details about the jet, which is presumed to be the Pentagon’s first attempt to build a “sixth-generation” tactical aircraft after the fifth-gen F-22 and F-35 jets. It’s broken a lot of records in the doing.” “NGAD has come so far that the full-scale flight demonstrator has already flown in the physical world.
“NGAD right now is designing, assembling, testing in the digital world, exploring things that would have cost time and money to wait for physical world results,” Roper said during a video presentation at the Air Force Association’s Virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Tuesday. Will Roper, the head of Air Force acquisition, revealed the existence of the new jet, which he said was part of the service’s Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, project. Air Force’s disclosure that it has secretly built and flown a prototype fighter jet could signal a shift in how the military buys weapons and who builds them.
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