The Doubtful Future of the U.S. Air Force’s Planned NGAD Fighter
.By Bill Sweetman
U.S. Air Force chief of staff General David Allvin handed a surprise to industry on 13 June by suggesting that the service might not proceed as expected with its next combat aircraft, the one planned in the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program.
Asked whether the USAF could go ahead with NGAD, Allvin said: ‘We’re going to have to make those choices, make those decisions, across the landscape.’
The USAF has been extremely secretive about NGAD, including about the testing of at least one demonstrator at the air force’s covert flight test base in Nevada (popularly known as Area 51). Nonetheless, selection of a single contractor had been hinted at for this year. NGAD and its precursor, the Aerospace Innovation Initiative (AII), have been under way for nine years and the closely associated variable-cycle Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) engine for longer than that.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/07/01/the_doubtful_future_of_the_us_air_forces_planned_ngad_fighter_1041402.html
