F-47

The United States' first sixth-generation fighter — the Boeing F-47 is the crewed centerpiece of the US Air Force's Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family, designed to replace the F-22 Raptor and fight alongside uncrewed wingmen deep inside contested airspace. Awarded to Boeing in March 2025 after a near-death cost pause, it exists so far only as classified test articles and deliberately misleading renderings: the Air Force claims a combat radius over 1,000 nautical miles, speed above Mach 2 and "stealth++", with the first airframe now in assembly in St. Louis and first flight targeted for 2028 — three years after China's rival J-36 and J-50 prototypes started flying in the open.

Overview

The F-47 is the US Air Force's sixth-generation air-superiority fighter, developed by Boeing Defense as the crewed core of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) "family of systems" and the designated successor to the F-22 Raptor. It is designed for penetrating counter-air — fighting for air superiority inside the densest anti-access environments, above all a Pacific war against China — with much longer reach than today's fighters (the service claims a combat radius beyond 1,000 nautical miles, roughly 70 percent better than the F-22), next-level low observability the Air Force shorthand-brands "stealth++", and built-in teaming with Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drone wingmen such as the YFQ-42A and Anduril Fury. The engineering and manufacturing development contract went to Boeing on 21 March 2025 in a winner-take-all decision over Lockheed Martin; the Air Force says it wants a fleet of "185-plus" — more than the Raptor force it replaces. Nothing about the aircraft's true configuration is public: every released image is an altered rendering, every performance figure an official claim that cannot be verified until the jet flies, which the Air Force now targets for 2028.

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