Tja, Boeing lå vel ikke godt an med diverse skandaler og pågående KC-46 program som ligger 7 år etter programmet. Det samme gjør dette programmet: https://tinyurl.com/yvfrnyy Kan være at det er for å avhjelpe Boeings forferdelige økonomiske problemer og dårlige rykte. Denne saken er også verdt å merke seg: https://tinyurl.com/cpmyydwf Høres ut som et sjansespill. Slik vil Next Generation Air Defense flyet se ut:
(Red.)
Trump
announces new US sixth-generation fighter jet that will be built by Boeing
By Oren Liebermann and Alejandra Jaramillo, CNN
4 minute read
Updated 3:58 PM EDT, Fri
March 21, 2025
President
Donald Trump delivers remarks as an image of an F-47 sixth-generation fighter
jet is displayed in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, on
March 21, 2025.
Carlos Barria/Reuters
CNN —
President Donald Trump announced
the Pentagon’s decision to move forward with a next-generation fighter jet
titled F-47 on Friday in joint remarks alongside Secretary of Defense Pete
Hegseth from the Oval Office.
“At my direction, the United States Air Force is moving forward with
the world’s first sixth-generation fighter jet, number six, sixth generation,
nothing in the world comes even close to it, and it’ll be known as the F-47,”
Trump said.
Trump announced that Boeing had been awarded the contract for the
newest US fighter aircraft.
The president went on to say an experimental version of the F-47 has
been flying for almost five years. At the end of the first Trump
administration, the Air Force acknowledged that it had flown a full-scale
prototype of the jet.
“After a rigorous and thorough competition between some of America’s
top aerospace companies, the Air Force is going to be awarding the contract for
the next generation air dominance platform to Boeing,” Trump announced.
Until now, the program had been known as Next Generation Air Dominance
(NGAD). But in an apparent reference to his own presidency, Trump said the
aircraft would be known as the F-47. Aircraft designations are normally
announced by the Air Force.
“It’s something the likes of which nobody has seen before,” Trump said,
“and this has been in the works for a long period of time.”
Trump also promised the F-47 would be able to cooperate with unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are a major focus of the military, especially as
the US has watched Ukraine and Russia effectively use drones in relatively
inexpensive long-range attacks and employed drone swarms to overwhelm aerial
defenses.
“This plane flies with drones. It flies with many, many drones, as many
as you want,” Trump said. “It’s a technology that’s new, but it doesn’t fly by
itself. It flies with many drones, as many as you want, and that’s something
that no other plane can do.”
It was the Air Force’s decision to award the F-47 program to Boeing,
but Trump’s celebration of the announcement was somewhat of a surprise, since
he has repeatedly criticized the company.
Trump has railed against Boeing for the cost overruns and delays with
the next Air Force One. “We are getting a new Air Force One, if Boeing could
ever finish the damn thing,” Trump said in February. Boeing’s leadership said
they would try to move the delivery schedule up, but there’s “no silver bullet”
for the program.
Another major Boeing program for the Air Force - the KC-46 tanker - is
projected to be more than seven years behind its original timeline for reaching full-rate production,
according to the Government Accountability Office, a far cry from the Trump
administration’s goal of producing systems faster and more efficiently.
For decades, Boeing produced the backbone of the US bomber fleet, from
B-17s and B-29s in World War II to B-52s that rolled off the assembly line in
the 1960s and are still flying today. Boeing now produces the F-15EX Eagle and
F/A-18 Super Hornet, two major platforms for the Air Force and the Navy,
respectively. These fighter aircraft are derivatives of designs initially
developed by McDonnell Douglas, an aircraft manufacturer that merged with
Boeing in 1997.
The last production fighter designed and built exclusively by Boeing is
the P-26 Peashooter, which first flew in 1932. Boeing also designed and built
the X-32 Joint Strike Fighter, which ultimately lost out to the Lockheed Martin
F-35 Lightning II.
Late-last year, the Air Force paused the decision on how to proceed
with the sixth-generation fighter. The Air Force said in December that
then-Secretary Frank Kendall would defer the decision to the Trump
administration.
The Next Generation Air Dominance program is intended to produce the US
military’s sixth-generation fighter jet, newer and more advanced than the
Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, which has suffered from major cost overruns
and delays.
Elon Musk has railed against the F-35, instead advocating for unmanned
drone swarms as a cheaper, more effective weapon. On social media in November,
Musk said “Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like
the F-35.”
When Lockheed Martin was awarded the F-35 in October 2001, the weapons
maker said the program would cost approximately $200 billion. The company’s CEO
promised the F-35 would be “capable and affordable” and be produced “on
schedule and cost.” More than two decades later, the total cost of the program
has exceeded $2 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), as the
military services “plan to use it less.”
Ingen kommentarer:
Legg inn en kommentar
Merk: Bare medlemmer av denne bloggen kan legge inn en kommentar.