President Donald Trump on Friday said the Pentagon was awarding a contract to Boeing to build and support a sixth-generation fighter jet that will be known as the F-47, calling the new manned warplane “something the likes of which nobody has seen before.”
Speaking in the Oval Office alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and top Air Force leaders, Trump said the planned fighter had “been in the works for a long period of time” and would be built by Boeing after “a rigorous and thorough competition between some of America's top aerospace companies” for a program that the Defense Department has been calling the “Next Generation Air Dominance” platform.
Trump also described the fighter as “the most advanced, most capable, most lethal aircraft ever built” and said an experimental version of the aircraft “has secretly been flying for almost five years.”
“We're confident that it massively overpowers the capabilities of any other nation ... every other plane I've seen, every one of them, and it's not even close,” he said. “It's virtually unseeable and unprecedented power. It's got the most power of any jet of its kind ever made. Maneuverability, likewise ... there's never been anything like it.”
Trump added that America’s adversaries would “never see it coming” if it is ever deployed in anger and insisted enemies “won't know what the hell hit them” if they are engaged by the “fleet of these magnificent planes.”
Hegseth, the former Fox News weekend host turned defense chief, told reporters the announcement of the new fighter program was “a big day for our country, a big day in the world” and said the planned jet would send “a very direct, clear message to our allies that we're not going anywhere, and to our enemies, that we can — we will be able to project power around the globe unimpeded for generations to come.”
“This is a historic investment in the American military, in American industrial base, in American industry, that will help revive the warrior ethos inside our military,” he said.
Hegseth criticized the prior Biden administration for having considered scrapping the expensive fighter program, which he called “cheaper, longer range and more stealthy” than alternatives.
“President Trump said we're reviving it, and we're doing it, and then we are also going to reestablish deterrence. Under the previous administration, we looked like fools. Not anymore,” he said.
Air Force Chief of Staff General David Alvin also weighed in at the president’s request, thanking both Trump and Hegseth for what he called their “unwavering commitment to our military” and called the announcement “a big day for our United States Air Force.”
“Air dominance is not a birthright, but it's become synonymous with American air power. But air dominance needs to be earned every single day, and since the earliest days of aerial warfare, brave American airmen have jumped into their machines, taken to the air, and they've cleared the skies, and whether that be clearing the skies so we can rain down destruction on our enemies from above, we can clear the path for the ground forces below,” Alvin said.
“That's been our commitment to the fight, and that's really been our promise to America, and with this F 47 as the crown jewel in the next generation air dominance family of systems, we're going to be able to keep that promise well into the future.”
The Air Force general added that the next-generation fighter would allow the Air Force to “look into the future and unlock the magic that is human machine teaming” by allowing manned and unmanned fighter aircraft to work together.
He also said the program would allow “more control in the hands of the government” to let the Air Force “update and adapt at the speed of relevance, at the speed of technology, not at the speed of providers.”
The F-47 contract award represents a rare moment of good news for Boeing, which in recent years has suffered numerous public setbacks in the form of passenger airliner crashes and the failure of its Starliner manned spacecraft during a test flight which resulted in a pair of U.S. astronauts spending eight months on the International Space Station rather than a planned eight days. NASA officials elected to return the capsule to earth unmanned due to fears of thruster failure.
Boeing has also reportedly lost billions on a long-delayed contract to deliver a pair of heavily-modified 747 aircraft to the Air Force for use as presidential transports.
According to Aviation Week, the F-47 is likely to be built in Boeing’s St. Louis, Missouri factory, which has built American fighter aircraft since the Second World War.
It will replace the F-22 Raptor, the last of which was built more than a decade ago by Boeing’s rival Lockheed, in the Air Force’s inventory as a first-call air superiority fighter.
Deliveries of the new aircraft could potentially supplant the beleaguered F-35A in the Air Force’s fighter stocks, with the controversial joint fighter’s future uncertain under Trump’s cost-cutting initiatives despite plans for many of America’s allies to purchase the fifth-generation multirole aircraft.
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