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.

Development

The F-47 grew out of DARPA's 2014 Aerospace Innovation Initiative, which produced classified X-plane demonstrators — the first, built by Boeing, reportedly flying as early as 2019, with a second (Lockheed Martin) airframe following around 2022 and both accumulating hundreds of flight hours, per DARPA and Defense News. By 2023 the Air Force envisioned roughly 200 NGAD fighters flying with as many as 1,000 drone wingmen, per TWZ. Then the program nearly died: in mid-2024, with projected unit costs reported at roughly three times an F-35, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall publicly confirmed the service was "taking a pause" on the source selection and studying whether a crewed super-fighter was still the right answer, per Breaking Defense. The review concluded there was "no more viable option than NGAD to achieve air superiority in this highly contested environment," per Defense One, and on 21 March 2025 President Trump announced Boeing had won, naming the jet F-47 — a number the Air Force says honors the P-47 Thunderbolt, the service's 1947 founding, and the 47th president's backing, per the US Air Force. The cost-plus-incentive-fee EMD contract — value classified, announced as "worth more than $20 billion" — covers a small number of test aircraft with priced options for initial production. In May 2025 Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin published the first official performance claims (1,000+ nmi radius, Mach 2+, 185+ fleet), per Air & Space Forces Magazine; by September 2025 he confirmed the first F-47 was in manufacture with first flight expected in 2028. In May 2026 the first airframe was reported on the floor of Boeing's new ~$1.8 billion St. Louis fighter facility, and both competing NGAP adaptive engines — GE's XA102 and Pratt & Whitney's XA103 — passed assembly readiness reviews, per AeroTime. The FY2027 budget requests $5.04 billion for the program plus $730 million for test infrastructure at Nellis AFB, per Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Design & capabilities

Everything public about the F-47's design is either an official claim or inference — the real configuration is classified and the released renderings are deliberately altered. What the Air Force asserts: a combat radius beyond 1,000 nautical miles (versus roughly 590 for the F-22), top speed above Mach 2, and a step beyond fifth-generation signature reduction it markets as "stealth++". Allvin's framing adds longer range, "more advanced stealth," higher availability, and lower deployment footprint than fifth-generation fighters — and, strikingly, a claim that it will cost less than the F-22, which sits uneasily against the ~$300 million-class unit-cost estimates that triggered the 2024 pause. The production aircraft is expected to be powered by one of two competing Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) engines — GE Aerospace's XA102 or Pratt & Whitney's XA103 — adaptive-cycle designs that can re-optimize between thrust and efficiency in flight, the key enabler of the range claim; both passed assembly readiness reviews in May 2026 and the downselect is still ahead. The F-47 is conceived from the outset as a quarterback for uncrewed wingmen: the Air Force ordered both Increment 1 CCA types — the General Atomics FQ-42 and Anduril FQ-44 — into initial production in June 2026, with about 150 planned by 2030 and a long-run vision of 1,000-plus. What the F-47 actually looks like, how big it is, and what it carries remain unknown outside classified channels.

Variants

• X-plane demonstrators: two classified airframes (Boeing, first flight reportedly 2019; Lockheed Martin, ~2022) that matured the technology — several hundred flight hours between them.
• F-47 EMD test aircraft: small batch under the March 2025 contract; first airframe in assembly at St. Louis since 2025–26.
• Production F-47: low-rate initial production exists only as priced contract options; no variant structure has been disclosed.
• A possible popular name, "Phoenix," surfaced on a 2025 program-office patch the Air Force called an early concept, not a final name.

Combat record / operational use

None — the F-47 has not flown. The program's operational story so far is budgetary and industrial: a fully funded EMD phase (FY26 ~$3.45 billion, FY27 request $5.04 billion, projected peak $5.25 billion in FY28), test infrastructure standing up at Nellis AFB, and the first airframe in build. The Air Force's own infographic listed an "operational" window of 2025–2029 that its schedule cannot support — first flight is targeted for 2028, and fielding in the early-to-mid 2030s is the realistic reading of the budget profile. Against that stands the uncomfortable optics that China's two sixth-generation prototypes — the Chengdu J-36 and Shenyang J-50 — have been flying in daylight since December 2024, though the Pentagon assesses both as "nascent" and potentially operational around 2035.

Advantages

• Range built for the Pacific — the claimed 1,000+ nmi combat radius directly answers the theater's tyranny of distance; the F-22 was built for a different map.
• Adaptive propulsion — NGAP engines promise fighter thrust with cruiser efficiency, the enabling technology for the range claim.
• CCA teaming from birth — designed to command FQ-42/FQ-44 drone wingmen rather than having teaming bolted on later.
• Funded and moving — full EMD funding, airframe in assembly, dedicated test infrastructure; survived the 2024 kill-or-keep review on the merits of its requirement.
• Industrial renewal — anchors Boeing's first clean-sheet in-house fighter and a new ~1.1M sq ft St. Louis production complex.

Drawbacks / limitations

• Nothing is verified — every performance figure is a service claim about an aircraft that has never flown; renderings are deliberately misleading.
• Cost contradiction — the 2024 pause was triggered by ~3x-F-35 unit costs; the "cheaper than an F-22" claim remains unsubstantiated.
• Timeline risk — 2028 first flight carries political framing, and the engine downselect is still open; China's airframes fly today.
• Fleet number is aspiration — "185+" is not a program of record; production options are unexercised.
• Single-service bet — the Navy's carrier F/A-XX counterpart lagged badly (award slipped to August 2026), concentrating US sixth-gen risk in one program.

Counterparts

The F-47's direct rivals are China's two flying sixth-generation prototypes: the big three-engine Chengdu J-36 and the twin-engine air-superiority-oriented Shenyang J-50 — both airborne since December 2024, both assessed by the Pentagon as roughly a decade from service. Within the US inventory it succeeds the F-22 Raptor (whose upgrades bridge the 2030s) and sits above the F-35A and F-15EX in the air-superiority mix, teamed with the YFQ-42A and Anduril Fury CCAs. Europe has no flying counterpart — GCAP (UK–Italy–Japan) targets ~2035 and FCAS (France–Germany–Spain) ~2040 — and Russia's Su-57 generation never closed the fifth-generation gap. The defining comparison is temporal: China flies visible hardware while the F-47 remains renderings and claims — yet the US has flown classified demonstrators since ~2019, so the real gap in either direction is genuinely unknown.

Outlook

The F-47 is now the Pentagon's flagship aircraft program and the single bet for US air superiority into mid-century. Watch four things. First, first flight — whether the 2028 target holds once real hardware meets real test points, and the FY29–31 budget taper that implies flight test from ~2029. Second, the engine downselect between GE's XA102 and Pratt & Whitney's XA103 — the adaptive engine is the range claim. Third, production commitment: exercising the LRIP options and whether "185+" becomes a program of record at anything like the claimed cost. Fourth, the pairing race — CCA Increment 1 is already in production, and an F-47 that flies in 2028 with ~150 drone wingmen fielded may matter more than any single-airframe comparison with the J-36 and J-50. If Boeing also wins the Navy's F/A-XX in August 2026, St. Louis will hold the entire US crewed sixth-generation portfolio — a concentration of industrial risk with no modern precedent.

Key specifications

All performance figures are official USAF claims for an aircraft that has not yet flown; configuration is classified.

Sources

1. Air Force Awards Contract for Next Generation Air Dominance Platform (F-47) — US Air Force
2. Boeing wins contract for NGAD fighter jet, dubbed F-47 — Defense News
3. Boeing Wins F-47 Next Generation Air Dominance Fighter Contract — TWZ
4. Air Force "taking a pause" on NGAD next-gen fighter: Kendall — Breaking Defense
5. Air Force Reveals Range and Inventory Goals for F-47, CCAs — Air & Space Forces Magazine
6. Allvin: First F-47 Fighter Being Built, Expected to Fly in 2028 — Air & Space Forces Magazine
7. What the F-47's Projected Budget Suggests About Its Development — Air & Space Forces Magazine
8. Pentagon budget goes "all in" on Air Force's F-47, putting Navy's F/A-XX on back burner — DefenseScoop
9. GE Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney advance NGAP engine prototypes — AeroTime
10. USAF Orders Both General Atomics' FQ-42 And Anduril's FQ-44 Into Production — TWZ
11. Why Boeing's F-47 NGAD win was existential for the company — Breaking Defense
12. DARPA X-planes paved the way for the F-47 — DARPA
13. Caudle: Navy plans to announce F/A-XX prime contractor in August — DefenseScoop
14. Pentagon report highlights China's sixth-generation fighter progress — FlightGlobal

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