The Pentagon has awarded the long-awaited contract for the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance future fighter jet, known as NGAD, to Boeing, President Donald Trump announced Friday.
The sixth-generation fighter, which will replace the F-22 Raptor, will be designated the F-47, Trump said. It will have “state-of-the-art stealth technologies [making it] virtually unseeable,” and will fly alongside multiple autonomous drone wingmen, known as collaborative combat aircraft.
“It’s something the likes of which nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said in an Oval Office announcement with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin and Lt. Gen. Dale White, the Air Force’s military deputy for acquisition, technology and logistics. “In terms of all the attributes of a fighter jet, there’s never been anything even close to it, from speed to maneuverability to what it can have [as] payload. And this has been in the works for a long period of time.”
“America’s enemies will never see it coming,” he continued.
Allvin said in a statement the F-47 will be “the most advanced, lethal and adaptable fighter ever developed.”
“We are not just building another fighter,” Allvin said. “We are shaping the future of warfare and putting our enemies on notice.”
The competition for NGAD was between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, after Northrop Grumman announced in 2023 that it would not compete for the program as a prime contractor.
“We recognize the importance of designing, building a sixth-generation fighter capability for the United States Air Force,” Steve Parker, the interim president and chief executive of Boeing Defense, Space and Security, said in a release. “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.”
Lockheed Martin said in a statement that it is disappointed by the result of the NGAD competition but is “confident we delivered a competitive solution.”
Lockheed did not say whether it was considering a protest of the award.
“We will await further discussions with the U.S. Air Force on any next steps,” the company said.
The F-47 will be the heart of the NGAD concept’s “family of systems,” which also includes collaborative combat aircraft and cutting-edge sensors, weaponry and other technology that will allow it to better connect with satellites and other aircraft. Air Force officials have consistently said NGAD will be necessary to counter an advanced adversary, such as China.
General Atomics and Anduril are building their own CCA candidates — the RFQ-42A and RFQ-44A, respectively — to be the first iteration of drone wingmen flying alongside the F-35 or F-47. Subsequent generations are on their way. The Air Force wants CCAs to be relatively cheap, piloted with autonomous software and have the ability conduct recon, strike missions, electronic warfare and decoy missions.
They are also expected to have advanced adaptive engines, dubbed NGAP or next-generation adaptive propulsion, that shift to the best configuration for any given situation for the best thrust and efficiency. General Electric Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney are in the running to build NGAP.
Boeing’s victory will likely help strengthen the defense industrial base, said Doug Birkey, executive director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. It means all three of the U.S. military’s prime aerospace contractors now have deals to build fifth- or sixth-generation stealth penetrating aircraft. Lockheed builds the fifth-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and Northrop has touted its B-21 Raider as the world’s first sixth-generation plane.
“For the country, that’s a really important thing, to have that innovation, that competition and frankly, the volume production,” Birkey said. “Our ability to turn stuff en masse — which is what the future world is going to require — has been limited, and we need to rebuild the defense industrial base that the current environment demands. We’ve been slow to get there. This is an important step in rounding that corner.”
But Boeing has struggled company-wide in recent years on both civilian and military aircraft. Nearly 350 people died in a pair of crashes of the company’s 737 Max airliners, and last July, the company agreed to a plea deal with the Justice Department to avoid a felony fraud trial related to the crashes. The door plug of another 737 Max blew out in midair in January 2024, and videos from the harrowing scene went viral. Boeing’s machinists also went on strike for nearly two months last year amid a contract dispute.
The aerospace giant’s T-7A Red Hawk trainer, KC-46A Pegasus tanker and Air Force One programs have struggled with quality problems and delays, and the company has lost billions of dollars in cost overruns. In September 2024, Boeing fired the head of its defense sector, Ted Colbert, amid steep losses.
Amid that turmoil, Birkey said, this was an important win for Boeing — and now the company must show it can produce.
“It’s up to Boeing to make this opportunity a win,” Birkey said. “Only time will tell on that.”
The engineering and manufacturing development contract awarded Friday is structured as a cost-plus incentive fee deal, an Air Force official said. Under such a deal, the government pays the contractor to cover expenses as it develops a system, and the contractor also receives a fee that can be adjusted based on how well it performs. That is the same structure used for the early development of Northrop Grumman’s B-21 Raider stealth bomber.
Under this contract, the official said, Boeing will mature, integrate and test all parts of the NGAD crewed fighter, and it will produce a handful of test aircraft.
Boeing’s contract also includes “competitively priced” options for building low-rate initial production models of the F-47, the Air Force said.
Allvin said in a statement Friday that experimental versions of the NGAD have been flying for the last five years, “flying hundreds of hours, testing cutting-edge concepts and proving that we can push the envelope of technology with confidence.”
Allvin said the significant advance experimentation and work on the F-47 will allow the service to fly the jet by the end of Trump’s administration. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency helped conduct the early experimentation to refine NGAD, the Air Force said.
“The F-47 has unprecedented maturity,” Allvin said. “While the F-22 is currently the finest air superiority fighter in the world, and its modernization will make it even better, the F-47 is a generational leap forward. The maturity of the aircraft at this phase in the program confirms its readiness to dominate the future fight.”
Allvin also scoffed at China’s claims last December to have test flown its own sixth-generation fighter, the J-36.
“Despite what our adversaries claim, the F-47 is truly the world’s first crewed sixth-generation fighter, built to dominate the most capable peer adversary and operate in the most perilous threat environments imaginable,” Allvin said. “While our X-planes were flying in the shadows, we were cementing our air dominance — accelerating the technology, refining our operational concepts, and proving that we can field this capability faster than ever before.”
Allvin said the F-47 would cost less than the F-22 and “be more adaptable to future threats.” The Air Force will have more NGAD fighters in its fleet than Raptors, he added. The Air Force now has about 180 F-22s, which cost $143 million apiece.
Trump declined to disclose the price of NGAD, saying that would reveal some of the jet’s highly classified technology and size. But the Air Force expects to spend $20 billion on NGAD between 2025 and 2029.
The price of NGAD has presented a major vulnerability to the program, one which placed it in jeopardy last year. Former Air Force Sec. Frank Kendall paused the program in May 2024 after cost estimates came in around triple that of the F-35, or as much as $300 million per tail.
The pause was needed, Kendall said, to reconsider whether NGAD was the right concept and look for ways to bring its costs down through a redesign. A review of the program concluded that NGAD was necessary, but after the presidential election, Kendall chose to leave the final decision on how to proceed to the incoming Trump administration.
The Air Force said decisions on basing the F-47 and other program elements will be made in years to come, as the fighter comes closer to becoming operational.
Trump also left the door open to selling versions of NGAD to allies — though he said those might be “toned-down” versions.
“Because someday, maybe they’re not our allies, right?” Trump said.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
