NGAD Deadline: Air Force’s next-generation fighter will be selected in 2024

UPDATED 5/18/23 at 3:00 PM ET with details on the fighter’s Milestone B decision.

WASHINGTON — The Air Force has formally begun to solicit proposals for its secretive Next Generation Air Dominance fighter, according to a service news release, with the goal of awarding a contract for the jet next year.

“The Department of the Air Force released a classified solicitation to industry for an Engineering and Manufacturing Development contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance Platform with the intent to award a contract in 2024,” the release says, which doesn’t specifically state when the notice was posted. “This solicitation release formally begins the source selection process providing industry with the requirements the DAF expects for NGAD, as the future replacement of the F-22.”

“The NGAD Platform is a vital element of the Air Dominance Family of Systems which represents a generational leap in technology over the F-22, which it will replace.” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in the release. “NGAD will include attributes such as enhanced lethality and the abilities to survive, persist, interoperate, and adapt in the air domain, all within highly-contested operational environments. No one does this better than the U.S. Air Force, but we will lose that edge if we don’t move forward now.”

According to the release, the NGAD program will leverage “open architecture standards” to ensure that contractors can compete to sustain the aircraft throughout its lifecycle, which would help to drive down costs to keep the aircraft flying. The pool of vendors vying to build the aircraft is unclear, though defense giants Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman are assumed to be in the mix. 

The Air Force is requesting billions of dollars over the next five years for NGAD R&D efforts, with an initial buy of 200 planned, though a price tag for the fighter is currently unclear. However, Kendall has hinted it is going to be incredibly expensive, being “multiples of the F-35,” likely totaling several hundred million per tail. 

Separately, the fighter will be powered by an adaptive engine developed through the Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) program, leveraging the work achieved by the Adaptive Engine Transition Program that officials are seeking to discontinue in fiscal 2024. General Electric and Pratt & Whitney are both competing to build the NGAD’s powerplant, with a GE official recently suggesting that a ramp-up in funding for NGAP could carry both vendors through the prototyping phase.

The Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft drones that will join NGAD in combat will be separate from the fighter’s solicitation process, according to the release. 

At least one full-scale NGAD prototype is known to have flown in 2020, but the program’s high classification levels have mostly shrouded its status in secrecy. Last year, Kendall said the program had entered the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase for the fighter, though he later backtracked to clarify that the program had not passed the milestone B marker that formally launches EMD, according to a report in Defense News. 

Following Kendall’s remarks, the Defense Department Inspector General launched a review of NGAD “to determine the extent to which the Air Force demonstrated that the critical technologies used in the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter aircraft were mature enough to support entry into the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase of the NGAD program’s acquisition timeline,” according to a September 26 memo [PDF].

The results of that review have not been made public, though Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek told Breaking Defense in a statement that “At the conclusion of the source selection the program will go to the Service Acquisition Executive (SAE) for a Milestone B decision to award the EMD contract to the successful offeror.”

According to Kendall, the Air Force plans to field the fighter by the end of the decade.