USAF - Designed, Built and Flew new Fighter Jet in less than a year!

[Lord Tin Foilhat]

No pictures or other info yet.

The US Air Force has built and flown a mysterious full-scale prototype of its future fighter jet

Does this give the Next Generation Air Dominance program more momentum, or does it open it up to more scrutiny?

www.defensenews.com

“We’ve already built and flown a full-scale flight demonstrator in the real world, and we broke records in doing it,” Will Roper told Defense News in an exclusive interview ahead of the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference. “We are ready to go and build the next-generation aircraft in a way that has never happened before.”

Almost every detail about the aircraft itself will remain a mystery due to the classification of the Next Generation Air Dominance program, the Air Force’s effort for fielding a family of connected air warfare systems that could include fighters, drones and other networked platforms in space or the cyber realm.

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The importance, Roper said, is that just a year after the service completed an analysis of alternatives, the Air Force has proven it can use cutting-edge advanced manufacturing techniques to build and test a virtual version of its next fighter — and then move to constructing a full-scale prototype and flying it with mission systems onboard.

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[Lord Tin Foilhat]

love this little tidbit:

There is also a strategic benefit to continuous fighter production and development, Roper said. It puts China on the defense, having to respond to U.S. technical advances as new capabilities — whether they’re hypersonic missiles or drone wingmen — are matured and spiraled into the fighter’s production.

“This speeds up the pace at which we can do things so that we can be the disrupter instead of the disrupted, but it does so in a way that can’t be undermined by throwing cheap labor at the problem,” he said.

 

[nytebyte]

I guess even when China finally steals the plans to this new plane, they will be obsolete in less than 20 years.