(Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional information.)
The Trump administration today announced Boeing has been selected to produce the Air Force’s multibillion-dollar Next Generation Air Dominance penetrating platform, beating out Lockheed Martin in the contest after months of uncertainty.
“At my direction, the United States Air Force is moving forward with the world’s first sixth-generation fighter jet,” President Trump said today. “In terms of all of the attributes of a fighter jet, there's never been anything even close to it -- from speed to maneuverability, to what it can have, to payload.”
The platform will be called the F-47. Trump is the 47th president of the United States.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin joined Trump in the Oval Office to unveil the long-awaited decision.
“The F-47 will be the most advanced, most capable, most lethal aircraft ever built,” Trump said. “An experimental version of the plane has secretly been flying for almost 5 years and we're confident that it massively overpowers the capabilities of any other nation.”
Despite the public’s attention surrounding the decision today, the NGAD program remains classified along with the price, per-tail order number and other details included in the newly announced contract, service spokesperson Ann Stefanek told Inside Defense following Trump’s remarks.
In a formal press release, the Air Force said the contract “will produce a small number of test aircraft for evaluation. The contract also includes competitively priced options for low- rate initial production.”
The service originally projected NGAD would not enter service until the 2030s, but today the leaders stated the weapon system would be fielded during the Trump administration -- which ends in 2028.
“Both proposals were evaluated against the source selection criteria in a fair, deliberate and impartial manner,” Stefanek added. “The Boeing proposal represents the best overall value to the government and is best suited to fulfill the Air Force’s requirements.”
When asked the extent to which Trump was involved in the decision-making process, she said: “The Milestone Decision Authority for the NGAD program is the Air Force Senior Acquisition Authority, who made the decision to proceed with milestone B. As a matter of course, we do not reveal the identity of the source-selection authority (SSA) in order to protect the integrity of the source-selection process. This allows the SSA to operate free of any influence by outside parties and to provide an unbiased decision on the evaluation of the offerors solely based on the criteria set forth in the solicitation.”
The down select comes after Boeing debuted its new 1.1-million-square-foot, $1.8 billion classified Advanced Combat Aircraft facility in St. Louis to reporters over the summer, but executives declined at the time to name any specific platforms planned to be built there or how many different programs the facility will be able to execute at one time. Construction of the site is set to be complete in 2026.
"We recognize the importance of designing, building and delivering a sixth-generation fighter capability for the United States Air Force,” Steve Parker, the interim president of Boeing’s Defense, Space and Security division, said in a statement. “In preparation for this mission, we made the most significant investment in the history of our defense business, and we are ready to provide the most advanced and innovative NGAD aircraft needed to support the mission.”
For its part, Lockheed said it is “committed to advancing the state of the art in air dominance to ensure America has the most revolutionary systems to counter the rapidly evolving threat environment. While disappointed with this outcome, we are confident we delivered a competitive solution. We will await further discussions with the U.S. Air Force.”
The Air Force in July paused the NGAD program to allow officials time to rethink the sixth-generation platform’s requirements amid competing fiscal responsibilities, a fresh awareness of the threat posed by China and the early success of the related Collaborative Combat Aircraft.
Some early estimates projected NGAD costs pushing $300 million per tail -- roughly triple the cost of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
In his remarks Hegseth criticized the pause enacted by the Biden administration to reimagine NGAD, saying “we looked like fools.”
“This is a historic investment in the American military, in the American industrial base, in American industry that will help revive the warrior ethos inside our military,” Hegseth said. “They paused this program and were prepared to potentially scrap it. We know this is cheaper, longer range and more stealthy. President Trump said we're reviving it and we're doing it and then we are also going to reestablish deterrence. Under the previous administration we looked like fools. Not anymore.”
Before the reconsideration, the service had planned to award an engineering and manufacturing development contract last summer to either Boeing or Lockheed Martin after Northrop Grumman dropped out of the original contest in 2023.
In December then-outgoing service Secretary Frank Kendall said the fate of the manned NGAD platform would be decided by the Trump administration either once an analysis of alternatives had wrapped up or in the fiscal year 2026 budget request.
Originally meant to be a seamless replacement to the F-22 Raptor, the Air Force in its FY-25 budget request asked for an additional $815 million for NGAD for development and testing of air vehicle and mission systems and other planning or design work, bringing the total to $3.4 billion. It builds off a $1.9 billion request in FY-24.
The $3.4 billion breaks down into $2.8 billion for the manned platform and $559 million for CCAs, or the combat-coded drones intended to team with manned fighters in battle in large groups.
“Compared to the F-22, the F-47 will cost less and be more adaptable to future threats -- and we will have more of the F-47s in our inventory,” Allvin said in a statement. “The F-47 will have significantly longer range, more advanced stealth, be more sustainable, supportable and have higher availability than our fifth-generation fighters. This platform is designed with a “built to adapt” mindset and will take significantly less manpower and infrastructure to deploy.”
The now finalized AOA took a magnifying glass to the jet’s requested exquisite characteristics, service officials said recently, including the platform’s preferred lethality and payload capacity, whether it needed an adaptive engine, if the fighter would be flown with a crew or autonomously and the number of CCA drones NGAD could manage in battle.
Today Trump said the F-47 would be “equipped with state-of-the-art stealth technologies with virtually unseeable and unprecedented power.” The aircraft’s speed would be “over two,” he added, likely referring to Mach 2.
That capability is “something that you don’t hear very often. America's enemies will never see it coming,” according to the president.
The U.S. would also consider foreign military sales of the F-47 to certain allies, Trump said, but in those cases, “we’d like to tone them down about 10%, which probably makes sense because someday maybe they're not our allies, right?”
Additionally, Trump said Boeing’s NGAD could fly with as many loyal drone wingmen as it wants or needs to. The Air Force had previously indicated about five to eight CCAs would accompany the advanced fighter in war, but that the number could grow as research and development continued.
Although China recently revealed its version of a sixth-generation fighter jet, Allvin said the F-47 is the first-ever crewed aircraft of its kind.
NGAD has been “built to dominate the most capable peer adversary and operate in the most perilous threat environments imaginable,” the Air Force’s top officer said in a statement. “With the F-47, we will strengthen our global position, keeping our enemies off-balance and at bay. And when they look up, they will see nothing but the certain defeat that awaits those who dare to challenge us.”