Megaprojects (AKA Simon Whistler) takes a look at the forthcoming, radically advanced F-47 stealth fighter.
“The F-47 is the United States Air Force’s new sixth generation air superiority fighter.”
“It’s being built by Boeing as the centerpiece of the Next Generation Air Dominance program, or NGAD. Because the military loves a good acronym almost as much as they love overspending.”
“It is designed to be the successor to the F-22 Raptor, which means its primary job is simple: Go to a place where the enemy has absolute control of the air, kill everything flying, and then come home safely.”
“It’s built to operate as the quarterback of a swarm of semi-autonomous drones fighting in environments that are far too dangerous for today’s aircraft.”
“Why F-47? Well, it turns out the designation is a piece of triple layered symbolism. Historically, the F-47 designation was used in 1947 for the legendary P47 Thunderbolt, the unkillable heavy fighter of World War II. It also conveniently nods to 1947, the year the US Air Force was founded as an independent branch. And perhaps most importantly for the people signing the checks, it lines up oh so perfectly with the 47th president who pushed the program over the finish line.”
The F-22 was designed for the Cold War, but the Cold War ended.
“The threat shifted to the vast empty expanse of the Pacific. And in the Pacific, the Raptors got a bit of a problem. In military speak, it’s called combat radius. Basically how far the jet can go, do its job, and then get back home without running out of fuel. The F-22’s got a combat radius of about 590 nautical miles. The F-35 is a little bit better at around 670. That sounds like a lot until you look at a map of the Pacific Ocean, which is really big. In that theater, 600 mi gets you from your air base to, well, the absolute middle of nowhere.”
“The requirement for this new jet is a combat radius of over 1,000 nautical miles.” That’s a 70% increase over the F-22. “It means this jet can take off from London, fly a combat mission over Moscow, and fly back to London without needing to refuel.”
“The F-47 isn’t just a super fighter designed to go out and dogfight alone. It’s that quarterback we mentioned of a family of systems. It’s designed to fly into battle surrounded by loyal wingman drones, sensors, and electronic warfare platforms.”
“Internal estimates from the Air Force have put the price of a single F-47 around $300 million. For context, that’s roughly three times the price of an F-35. It is a staggering amount of money.”
“By the time President Trump announced the F-47 name, there hadn’t just been one prototype. There had been multiple X-planes flying hundreds of hours in secret test ranges.”
Boeing beat out competing finalist Lockheed Martin for the contract.
“But in 2024, the whole program almost drove off a cliff. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall looked at that $300 million per jet price tag and hit the pause button. The service spent months frantically studying alternatives. Could they just buy more F-35s? Could they upgrade older F-15s? By early 2025, the answer came back. No, that’s not going to be enough. If they want to beat China in the 2030s, they need this plane.”
“The timeline here is super aggressive. The Air Force claims that the real F-47, not just the demonstrators, will take its first flight around 2028. The goal is to have the first operational units ready by early 2029.”
Top speed is over Mach 2, and it’s capable of supercruise (i.e., fly over Mach 1 without afterburners for fuel efficiency).
The planned buy is 185 units, roughly the size of the current F-22 fleet. “This tells us the Air Force isn’t planning to replace every F-16 with an F-47. This is a plane that is going to be reserved for the absolute hardest missions”
“And finally, there’s the most controversial spec of all, its stealth rating. On the official Air Force graphic, the F-35 is labeled as stealth. The F-22 is labeled as stealth+. The F-47 is labeled as stealth++.”
“The F-47’s shape suggests that it’s designed to be invisible to everything.” Including low-frequency radar.
“Every official rendering shows a blended wing body, a shovel-nosed diamond-shaped wedge with no tail fins. This is the holy grail of stealth.”
“Without computers making micro adjustments a thousand times a second, a tailless fighter is just going to flip over and have a bad time.”
“The new adaptive engines, likely either GA’s XA102 or Prattt & Whitney’s XA103, can literally change their internals in mid-flight. They use a third stream of air flow to switch between a fuel sipping cruise mode and a high thrust combat mode. It gives you 30% more range and 20% more thrust from the same tank of gas.” Sort of like how the SR-71 engine switched internal configurations during different phases of flight.
“The F-47 is built with a modular open systems [computer] architecture…The hardware is just a shell for software that could be constantly updated. If a new missile or sensor is invented in 2035, well, you can just plug it in.”
Some speculate it could carry nuclear weapons if need be.
“But the most radical part of the F-47 isn’t the plane itself. It’s its mates. The F-47 is designed to never fight alone. It is the leader of a pack of robotic wingmen called collaborative combat aircraft, or CCAs. These are semi-autonomous drones that fly alongside the manned fighter. They’re jet powered, stealthy, and crucially, they’re affordable. The Air Force is targeting a price of $25 to $30 million per drone, which does sound like a lot, but compared to the $300 million mothership, these things are practically disposable. In March 2025, the Air Force designated the first two demonstrators for this program: The YFQ42A from General Atomics and the YFQ44A from Anduril.”
“The pilot in the F-47 is not flying them with a joystick. They’re just giving them commands like a quarterback calling a play. Drone One, jam that radar. Drone Two, fly ahead and scout. Drone Three, shoot anything that moves. The onboard AI is going to do the rest, which is pretty cool. This completely changes the job of the pilot. You’re no longer just an ace looking through a HUD. You’re essentially a sort of distributed air battle manager commanding a small robot squadron from the cockpit.”
“You can use the drones as missile trucks carrying extra weapons so the F-47 doesn’t have to ruin its stealth. You can send them ahead as decoys to trigger enemy defenses. You can even have them sacrifice themselves to save the manned jet. Like we said, they’re disposable $30 million drones.”
The Boeing contract for the F-47 is structured differently than Lockheed Martin’s was for the F-35, which was a walled garden. “If the Air Force wants to upgrade the F-35, they’ve got to go and pay Lockheed to do it, which is fantastic for Lockheed, but not so much for the Air Force. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall has publicly called that arrangement a quote serious mistake. For the F-47, the government is demanding government purpose rights for all that data.” It’s going to be a much more plug-and-play option, allowing different defense contractors to upgrade different components.
Unlike the F-22, Boeing might be allowed to sell slightly less capable versions of the F-47 to allies.
Snipping the section on potential rivals, like China, since right now it’s vaporware, and China’s capabilities always seem to radically lag their outsized boasts.
“The level of technical risk here is honestly pretty terrifying. The Air Force is trying to develop a new stealth airframe, a revolutionary adaptive cycle engine, a brand new mission system architecture, and a fleet of autonomous AI drones all at the same time. And they are trying to do it on a schedule that is significantly faster than the F-35s.” All true. But we’re radically far ahead of anyone else.
“Many aviation analysts, including those at the Warzone, have described the F-47 as likely being the Air Force’s last manned tactical jet.”
“There’s a human in the cockpit, but they’re not really there to pull Gs and dog fight. They’re there to make moral decisions and manage the swarm. It’s less Maverick and more systems administrator in a G-suit.”
“The pilots training today might be the last generation to ever actually sit inside the weapon that they are flying. After the F-47, the human likely moves to a ground control station and the cockpit becomes empty forever.”
Very possibly. Technology improves by leaps and bounds, while humans remain human. Plus an unmanned aircraft can pull radically more Gs than a manned one can…
Job interviews and book-related work have taken up the majority of my waking hours this week. Also, The Burning Time has fully arrived here in central Texas. It’s supposed to hit 108° on Monday…
There are plenty of risks with President Donald Trump’s trade strategy in China, but China faces risks of its own:
The smartest short-term decision Beijing can make is simply to absorb the next round of blows and hold its punches. For instance, if Washington moves ahead to impose 25% tariffs on $16 billion of Chinese imports, Beijing would withhold fire, in the hope of enticing Washington into a ceasefire, which in turn could create an opportunity to negotiate a face-saving way to avoid further and much more costly escalations.
The most compelling rationale behind this strategy of quick capitulation is to protect China’s centrality in the global manufacturing supply chain. About 43% of Chinese merchandise trade in 2017 (totaling $4.3 trillion) is, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, “processing trade” (which involves importing intermediate goods and assembling the products in China). What China gains from processing trade is the utilization of its low-cost labor force, factories, and some technological spillover. Processing trade generates low value-added and profitability. For example, Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles iPhones in China, had an operating margin of only 5.8% last year.
One of the greatest risks China faces in a prolonged trade war with the U.S. is the loss of its processing trade. Even a modest increase in American tariffs can make it uneconomical to base processing in China. Should the U.S.-China trade war escalate, many foreign companies manufacturing in China would be forced to relocate their supply chains. China could face the loss of millions of jobs, tens of thousands of shuttered factories, and a key driver of growth.
However, capitulating to a “trade bully,” as the Chinese media calls Trump, is hard for Xi, a strongman in his own right. Worse still, it is unclear what Trump wants or how China can appease him. The terms his negotiators presented to Beijing in early May were so harsh that it is inconceivable that Xi could accept them without being seen as selling out China.
Even if the trade war with the U.S. could be de-escalated with Chinese concessions, Beijing faces another painful decision. The trade war in general, and in particular the forced shutdown of the Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE after Washington banned the company from using American-made parts have highlighted China’s strategic vulnerability from its economic interdependence with the U.S. Before the two countries became geopolitical adversaries, economic interdependence was a valuable asset for China. It could take advantage of this relationship to build up its strength while the mutual economic benefits cushioned their geopolitical conflict.
But with the overall U.S.-China relationship turning adversarial, economic interdependence is not only hard to sustain (as shown by the trade war), but also is rapidly becoming a serious strategic liability. As the economically-weaker party, China is particularly affected. In the technological arena, China now finds itself at the mercy of Washington in terms of access to vital parts (such as semiconductors) and critical technologies (operating systems such as Android and Windows). Should the U.S. decide to cut off Chinese access for whatever reason, a wide swathe of Chinese economy could face disruption.
China’s somewhat vulnerable on semiconductors, but it’s severely vulnerable on semiconductor equipment.
Democratic U.S. House candidate and socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: “We need to occupy every airport.” Yeah. I can’t possibly see that backfiring. Sayeth Powerline’s John Hindraker:
Yes, please! Please go straight to LaGuardia and shut it down. But don’t stop there! “Every airport” needs to be occupied and shut down by Democrats. Between now and the midterm elections, Democrats should do all they can to make air travel inconvenient, and preferably impossible.
This actually happened not too long ago, in the fall of 2001. Ocasio-Cortez may be too young to remember it clearly, but all of America’s airports were closed for a few days as a result of al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks. Ocasio-Cortez is more ambitious, of course. She doesn’t just want to shut down “every airport” for a few days, she wants to make it long-term. Terrific, I say! Led by Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party could be as popular as al Qaeda by November.
Congress breaks record confirming trump picks. Also, check out this from Sen. Dianna Feinstein (D-CA): Oldham’s record “could not be more extreme and overtly political.” Really? Did he order kittens to be slaughtered in his chamber so he could bath in their blood while invoking Satan? No? In that case, I’d say he his a lot of headroom on the “more extreme” front… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The most difficult times I faced during my years with the LAPD were during the years Bernard Parks served as its chief. Parks, in an overreaction to the Rampart scandal (which, though a genuine scandal, was confined to a handful of officers at a single police station), had disbanded the LAPD’s gang units and instituted a disciplinary system that placed a penalty on proactive police work. It was under Chief Parks that I attended a supervisors’ meeting after a week in which my patrol division had seen four murders and a wave of lesser crimes. Despite these grim statistics, not a single word at this meeting touched on the subject of crime. What did we talk about? Citizen complaints. And even at that we didn’t discuss them in terms of the corrosive effect they were having on officer morale. Instead, we talked about the processing of the paperwork and the minutia of formatting the reports. Fighting crime, it seemed, had taken a back seat to dealing with citizen complaints, even the most frivolous of which required hours and hours of a supervisor’s time to investigate and complete the required reports.
As one might have expected, officers reacted to these disincentives by practicing “drive-and-wave” policing. Yes, they responded to radio calls as ever, but it became all but impossible to coax them out of their cars to investigate suspicious activity when they came upon it. As one might also have expected, the crime numbers reflected this change in police attitudes. Violent crime, which had been falling for seven years, began to increase and continued to increase until Bernard Parks was let go and replaced by William Bratton.
Which brings us back to Baltimore, where, USA Today informs us, 342 people were murdered in 2017, bringing its murder rate to an all-time high and making it the deadliest large city in America. (Baltimore’s population last year was about 611,000. In Los Angeles, by comparison, with a population of about 3.8 million, there were 293 murders last year.)
The Baltimore crime wave can be traced, almost to the very day in April 2015, that Freddie Gray, a small-time drug dealer and petty criminal, died in police custody. When Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby made the ill-considered decision to charge six officers in Gray’s death, she sent a clear message to the rest of the city’s police officers: concerns about crime and disorder will be subordinated to the quest for social justice.
As was the case in Los Angeles years ago, the result was entirely predictable. Officers disengaged from proactive police work, minimizing their risk of being the next cop to be seated in the defendant’s chair in some Marilyn Mosby show trial. The prevailing thought among Baltimore’s cops was something like this: They can make me come to work, they can make me handle my calls and take my reports, but they can’t make me chase the next hoodlum with a gun I come across, because if I chase him I might catch him, and if I catch him I might have to hit him or, heaven forbid, shoot him. And if that happens and Marilyn Mosby comes to the opinion that I transgressed in any way . . . well, forget it. Let the bodies fall where they may, and I’ll be happy to put up the crime-scene tape and wait for the detectives and the coroner to show up.
Andrew Cuomo fundraising tidbits. Cuomo has $31.1 million cash on hand and spent more on TV advertising ($1.5 million) than Cynthia Nixon has raised in total. Bonuses: Low-level shenanigans (one guy gave 69 donations totally $77) and Winklevoss twins!
Defeated Republican state representative Jason Villalba calls for President Trump’s impeachment. Thanks for reminding Republican primary voters, yet again, why they dumped you for Lisa Luby Ryan.
“Kicking, screaming, biting Kansas councilwoman finally taken down with Taser, arrested.” Bonus 1: She later bite a deputy’s thumb so hard she broke a bone. Bonus 2: She was elected to the Huron (population: 73) city council with a grand total of 2 votes.