USAF puts 6th-gen fighter on hold

DAYTON, Ohio—The Air Force is pausing its sixth-generation fighter jet program as it weighs whether the companies in the running to build it have the right design, a move that’s likely to delay the service’s plans to pick a builder this year.

“With the platform itself, we’re taking a pause,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said Tuesday at the Air Force’s Life Cycle Industry Days conference. “Before we commit to moving forward on a single design and a single supplier, we want to take a hard look at that program and make sure it’s right.”

The service will “take a few months” to figure out if it has the right design and operational concepts for the planned Next Generation Air Dominance aircraft, Kendall said, but reaffirmed that the program will eventually move forward, and likely be designed for a human pilot. 

“I'm absolutely confident we're still going to do a sixth-generation crewed aircraft. There's a chance it might be uncrewed, but I think we’re not quite ready for that yet and we can always do something like an optionally crewed platform,” he said. 

Questions about the future of NGAD started to swirl last month after Air Force officials declined to commit to building the sixth-gen fighter. The Air Force announced last year that they will pick a builder for NGAD this year, with Lockheed Martin and Boeing in the running—but that timeline might be in limbo now that the service is reconsidering the aircraft’s design.

The current NGAD designs came from a study that was commissioned in 2014 and an experimental aircraft program that started a year later, Kendall said—and adversaries’ capabilities have changed since then. 

“One of the things that has changed is the vulnerability of our airfields, or at least the threat to our airfields. China has fielded a huge inventory of cruise, ballistic, and now hypersonic missiles targeting our airfields. So the ability to survive on a large airfield and [if] you can only operate from large airfields is a problem for us,” Kendall said.

Other considerations include the fielding of collaborative combat aircraft—drones that will fly alongside fighter jets—and how that might affect the design of NGAD and augment the service’s fighter force, Kendall said. 

“We want to make sure we've got the right concept. We're gonna take a little bit of time to make sure we do before we make the major commitment, the biggest commitment in any given development program, which is to start design and development for production,” Kendall said.