USAF secretly builds and flies next-generation fighter demonstrator
By Garrett Reim16
September 2020
The US Air Force (USAF) has secretly designed, built and flown a
full-scale demonstrator aircraft that is part of its Next Generation Air
Dominance (NGAD) programme.
“NGAD has come so far that the full-scale flight demonstrator has
already flown in the physical world. It’s broken a lot of records in the
doing,” Will Roper, assistant secretary of the USAF for acquisition, technology
and logistics, said during a video presentation at the Air Force Association’s
virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference on 15 September. “A lot of the
mission systems that we require for Next Generation Air Dominance have been
flown on test articles. So, they are coming along very well.”
Source: US Air Force video
screenshot
Conceptual rendering of a next-generation fighter aircraft, not
necessarily the demonstrator that was announced by Roper
Roper declines to say anything else about the NGAD demonstrator. It is
not clear if the aircraft was built by the USAF or a contracted aerospace
manufacturer.
NGAD is the service’s programme to develop a next-generation fighter.
Digital engineering is credited with allowing the USAF to move quickly
from designing, to building and flying the NGAD demonstrator. “Digital
engineering seems to accelerate everything,” Roper says.
Many development tasks that previously had to be handled and figured
out in the physical world, such as systems integration, can now almost be entirely
simulated in the virtual world, allowing for the aircraft prototype to be
rapidly assembled.
“NGAD right now is designing, assembling, testing in the digital world,
exploring things that would have cost time and money to wait for physical world
results,” says Roper.
The NGAD, Boeing’s T-7A advanced jet trainer and Northrop Grumman’s
Ground Based Strategic Deterrent ballistic missile system are all examples of
USAF programmes extensively using digital engineering, says Roper.
Secretary of the USAF Barbara Barrett announced on 14 September that
any programme using digital engineering would receive the prefix “e” during the
development phase, for example, the eT-7A.
Roper says he decided to disclose the flight of the NGAD aircraft to
dispel doubts about digital engineering’s ability to speed up manufacturing.
“The whole idea of what you can digitally engineer is in question,” he
says. “I’ve had many people in the Pentagon and elsewhere say ’I see how you
could apply that approach to a trainer, like T-7, but you could not build a
cutting-edge warfighting system that way’.”
Roper says he also wants greater investment from private industry in
digital engineering.
“We’re going to drill on it until this is the way we do business and
every new programme will begin by building an e-system,” he says. “It’s truly
magical.”
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