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Generation game
Gareth Jennings - Aviation Desk Editor - London
The F-22 Raptor is the yardstick against which all fifth-generation aircraft are measured, but as production nears an end, what next?
Although the exact origins of the term fifth-generation fighter are unclear - some say it was a clever marketing ploy by Lockheed Martin to distinguish the F-22 and F-35 from its competitors, while others suggest that it was first coined by Russia in the mid-1990s to describe its latest machinery - it has become a widely accepted term for categorising the new breed of tactical stealth aircraft in service and under development throughout the world.
While an aspect of low observable (LO) or 'stealth' technology appears to be the distinguishing feature of such aircraft, it is but one of a number of capability attributes that define a fifth-generation fighter aircraft.
Since the term was first used, something of a consensus has been largely agreed upon as to just what capabilities are embodied in such a fighter. Broadly speaking, this consensus maintains that a fifth-generation fighter should combine the attributes of stealth, speed (supercruise) and sensor fusion.
Even so, different companies and countries have differing views on what exactly constitutes a fifth-generation fighter aircraft. Some companies such as Boeing, Eurofighter and Saab view the term disparagingly, citing fifth-generation facets to their supposedly fourth-generation designs. This, coupled with the fact that China, one of the world's foremost fighter producers, uses a different generational system entirely - it classifies aircraft as fourth-generation that would otherwise be recognised as fifth-generation in the West - makes it surprising that such a consensus exists at all.
Nevertheless, setting the protestations of many of the fourth-plus-generation manufacturers and China's unorthodoxy aside, it is generally accepted that there are currently seven fifth-generation aircraft types currently in service or in development around the world: the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor; the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF); the Sukhoi T-50 PAK-FA/Fifth-Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA); the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation (CAC) J-20; the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA); the Mitsubushi Heavy Industries ATD-X; and the Korea Aerospace Industries KFX.
Of these, only the F-22 has entered service, having made its operational debut with the US Air Force (USAF) in 1998. Still very much the yardstick by which all other fifth-generation aircraft are measured, the F-22 is now coming to the end of its production run with the 195th and final aircraft set to roll off the production line later this year.
Termed 'the drive to 195' by Lockheed Martin, this effort has already seen the final mid-fuselage section delivered to the final assembly line (FAL) in Marietta, Georgia. The final aft-fuselage and wings are expected to arrive at the FAL facility from Boeing in June. Boeing will also be building two additional sets of wings for spares and some elements of the aft fuselage in the event that the air force needs to replace battle-damaged aircraft in the future.
Although production is nearing its end, the evolution of the Raptor's capabilities is not. As Lockheed Martin has proceeded through the aircraft's production runs, the company has incorporated various enhancements to the baseline capability.
"The planes that are rolling off the line now are the most reliable we've ever built and exceed the actual KPPs [key performance parameters] that we were given for mean-time between maintenance," Jeff Babione, vice-president and general manager of the F-22 programme, told during a recent tour of the Fort Worth FAL.
As production has progressed, additional reliability and capability upgrades have been incorporated. Lockheed Martin is currently delivering Increment 2 aircraft to the USAF and is looking at getting a start release for Increment 3.1.
While increment upgrades have, to date, focused on improving the Raptor's air-to-air capability, Increment 3.1 is chiefly concerned with enhancing the aircraft in the air-to-surface role. To this end, Increment 3.1 includes incorporating the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb (the aircraft can carry eight internally and is the only platform that can launch the low-collateral munition supersonically to increase its standoff range to about 90 n miles), synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mapping, geo-location targeting capabilities and an electronic warfare/self-protection capability.
Primarily a software upgrade, Increment 3.1 began development in 2008. Follow-on testing and evaluation started in January 2011 and will continue until mid-2012. The current fleet will then undergo a retrofit, which is set to last until 2017.
Once Increment 3.1 is in place, Lockheed Martin will revert back to improving the Raptor's air-to-air capability with Increment 3.2. This upgrade is planned to integrate the Raytheon AIM-120D Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) and the AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missile onto the aircraft. These missiles will give the aircraft an increased off-boresight capability, which will greatly enhance its lethality.
Other Increment 3.2 improvements include incorporating geo-location targeting capabilities to reduce the time taken to capture an emitter and to put a bomb on target, along with advanced datalinks such as the Multifunction Advanced Data Link (MADL). MADL, which is also earmarked for the Lockheed Martin F-35 and the Northrop Grumman B-2, will enable all the USAF's LO platforms to talk to each other in an 'anti-access environment'. Increment 3.2 is to be fitted to all Block 30 and 35 aircraft - 150 jets in all.
According to Babione, Increment 3.2 will begin to be phased in about 2014. "We believe the customer will ask us to release that [3.2] capability incrementally in two-year timeframes," he said. "The whole point [of these upgrades] is to stay in advance of the threat."
In the meantime, the F-22 is currently the only fifth-generation fighter delivering on its promises of air dominance. To date, the Raptor has been deployed to 20 different locations, from Alaska to the United Arab Emirates, and although there have been concerns raised about its mission-capable rates (mainly as a result of issues surrounding maintaining the aircraft's LO coatings), the type currently boasts the highest tasking as a percentage of any of the fighters in the USAF's fleet. About 10 to 15 per cent of the Raptor force is deployed at any given time.
Even though the F-22 has not yet been fielded in combat, the exercises in which it has participated have proven it to be a more than capable air-dominance platform. During Exercise 'Valiant Shield' in Guam in 2010, the F-22 scored 168 kills against advanced surface and air threats and generated a 90 per cent sortie rate.
However, with production coming to an end and no prospect in sight of the US government re-starting the manufacturing line, Lockheed Martin is beginning to focus its attentions less on the here and now of production and more on the fleet's future sustainability.
The company's key priority right now is in ensuring that the expertise of the F-22 workforce (most of whom have been with the programme from its inception) will not be lost to future maintainers.
Tools of the trade
"One of the key conversations we have had over the past year is: 'What are we going to do with all the tooling?'" Babione said. "The direction from the air force right now is to preserve all 30,000 of the government-owned tools. Many of those will be stored in place at the vendors with some 20,000 being stored in CONEX shipping containers [some of which will be environmentally controlled]. These will be stored at the Sierra Army Depot, California."
As well as preserving its tools, Lockheed Martin has also set about archiving its knowledge by compiling electronic smartbooks for each of the major assembly tools. This is aimed at providing detailed instructions on how to use each tool and will, said Babione, enable maintainers 15 years down the line "to pull out the tool, open the book and know exactly how that tool was used.
"We have learnt from previous programmes that, when we move the tool or production facilities from place to place, then some of that knowledge is lost. We're capturing the knowíledge of our workforce in these smartbooks."
According to Babione, the company is on schedule to deliver the final Raptor in February 2012. "We haven't missed a delivery in more than four-and-a-half years and we don't plan on missing any of the [remaining deliveries]," he said.
With the F-22 production run nearing its end, Lockheed Martin is in the process of diverting resources to its other fifth-generation fighter line: the JSF.
F-35 flight-testing
The F-35 programme is unique in that its system design and development phase is set to run concurrently with production. As such, the flight-test programme recently received its 11th testbed aircraft, while on the manufacturing side the company is now ramping up the production rate and building up the supply chain to achieve the economies of scale that are so critical to achieving the programme's promised long-term savings.
The 11 flight test aircraft comprise four F-35A conventional take-off and landing (CTOL) aircraft, five F-35B short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) aircraft and two F-35C carrier variant (CV) aircraft (with a third CV aircraft set to join the programme in June).
Although the flight-test phase has run into a number of difficulties - the most recent when the fleet was temporarily grounded following an in-flight electric failure on the AF-4 (CTOL) test aircraft - the programme is ahead of schedule across the three variants for the first quarter of 2011, with 199 test flights flown versus a planned 142 flights. With the flight tests now largely proceeding to plan, the company is busy ramping up production capacity to the point whereby it expects to be able to roll out 200 new aircraft a year (compared to the current 51 and 11 per annum for the Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Rafale respectively).
"This high [production] rate gives us economies of scale; it's designed to be an affordable fifth-generation fighter to recapitalise international and US fleets," Dave Scott, Director of F-35 International Customer Engagement, told . In addition to economies of scale, the company has sought to increase the aircraft's affordability through the use of common parts and production techniques.
All three JSF variants feature 100 per cent common avionics and will be fitted with the same Pratt & Whitney F135 engine (an alternative General Electric/Rolls-Royce F136 engine is also under development but its future remains uncertain). There is also a high degree of commonality within the systems and structures across the different versions. All three variants will also be built on the same Fort Worth production line to keep costs to a minimum.
Lockheed Martin sees its global supply chain and manufacturing base as a further cap on costs. "We have best-of-class suppliers throughout the world who are delivering the components for the aircraft - BAE, for example, is building all of the aft fuselages.
"This provides us with a fifth-generation fighter ... with the global co-operation that comes with the programme, linking together the governments and the air forces with the industrial communities," Scott told .
As the programme stands, the US is set to receive 2,443 aircraft (1,763 F-35As for the USAF, 260 F-35Cs for the US Navy and 340 F-35Bs and 80 F-35Cs for the US Marine Corps). The UK (a Level 1 partner) has earmarked 138 F-35Cs for the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy (the actual quantity will be decided in the next Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2015); the Netherlands (a Level 2 partner) will get up to 85 F-35A aircraft; Italy (a Level 2 partner) is set to get 69 F-35A and 62 F-35B aircraft (the Italians will have the only other FAL site outside Fort Worth); Denmark will get 30 F-35As; Norway 48 to 56 F-35As; Turkey 100 F-35As; Australia 100 F-35As; and Canada 65 F-35As or F-35Cs.
With eight international partners committed to buying the aircraft, Lockheed Martin has identified a number of potential Foreign Military Sales (FMS) customers, although any sale would have to be negotiated on a government-to-government basis.
These include Israel, which has signed a letter of offer and acceptance with the US for about 20 aircraft; Singapore, which has been involved in the programme since 2004, funding studies, doing analysis work and examining when and how many aircraft they might buy (like Israel, the country is a Security Co-operations Participant); Japan, which is preparing for a request for proposals to replace some of its earlier model F-4s and F-15s; South Korea, which is examining F-35 and other aircraft for a competition that will likely occur in 2012; Greece, which has received briefings from the US government and has expressed an interest; and Spain, which has funded studies and had its navy look at the compatibility of the F-35B with their aircraft carriers. Finland and Belgium have also asked for, and received, information on the programme.
Besides these, Scott said that any country currently operating the F-16 or F/A-18 will be a potential customer for the F-35 over the next 10 to 15 years.
Beyond the US
While the US is undoubtedly the market leader in the development of the fifth-generation combat aircraft, there are a number of other projects throughout the world that show countries such as Russia, India, China, South Korea and Japan are all working hard to develop their own indigenous platforms in the form of the PAK-FA; FGFA and AMCA; J-20; KFX; and ATD-X respectively.
Of these, only the Russian PAK-FA and the Chinese J-20 have flown so far, the latter of which having made its maiden flight in January this year. The remaining platforms (with the exception of the FGFA, which is derived from the PAK-FA) are all design concepts at this stage and it is not yet clear if development will go ahead.
Even so, the prospect that non-allied nations might soon gain parity with its fighter force has caused the US to look beyond fifth-generation aircraft and to the as-yet-undefined sixth generation.
To this end, the USAF issued a capability request for information (CRfI) towards the end of last year in which it set out its key requirements for an F-22 replacement. This document called for the development of a Next Generation Tactical Aircraft capable of operating in an anti-access/area-denial environment in the 2030-50 timeframe.
To date, only one major defence contractor, Boeing, has admitted publicly to developing such a concept in the form of its F/A-XX. As a long-term replacement for the US Navy's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, the F/A-XX would be a tailless, two-seat, multirole platform that could be flown in either a manned or unmanned configuration.
However, as with all such programmes, sixth-generation fighter development depends as much on funding as it does in developing the technology. When Secretary of the [US] Air Force Michael Donley was asked what it would take to kick-start such a programme, his answer was short and to the point: "More money!"
Boeing has gone beyond fifth-generation aircraft with its proposed F/A-XX sixth-generation combat aircraft. With governmental cutbacks set to take effect, it is unclear if the funding will be in place to develop such a concept.
Gareth Jennings - Aviation Desk Editor - London
The F-22 Raptor is the yardstick against which all fifth-generation aircraft are measured, but as production nears an end, what next?
Although the exact origins of the term fifth-generation fighter are unclear - some say it was a clever marketing ploy by Lockheed Martin to distinguish the F-22 and F-35 from its competitors, while others suggest that it was first coined by Russia in the mid-1990s to describe its latest machinery - it has become a widely accepted term for categorising the new breed of tactical stealth aircraft in service and under development throughout the world.
While an aspect of low observable (LO) or 'stealth' technology appears to be the distinguishing feature of such aircraft, it is but one of a number of capability attributes that define a fifth-generation fighter aircraft.
Since the term was first used, something of a consensus has been largely agreed upon as to just what capabilities are embodied in such a fighter. Broadly speaking, this consensus maintains that a fifth-generation fighter should combine the attributes of stealth, speed (supercruise) and sensor fusion.
Even so, different companies and countries have differing views on what exactly constitutes a fifth-generation fighter aircraft. Some companies such as Boeing, Eurofighter and Saab view the term disparagingly, citing fifth-generation facets to their supposedly fourth-generation designs. This, coupled with the fact that China, one of the world's foremost fighter producers, uses a different generational system entirely - it classifies aircraft as fourth-generation that would otherwise be recognised as fifth-generation in the West - makes it surprising that such a consensus exists at all.
Nevertheless, setting the protestations of many of the fourth-plus-generation manufacturers and China's unorthodoxy aside, it is generally accepted that there are currently seven fifth-generation aircraft types currently in service or in development around the world: the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor; the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF); the Sukhoi T-50 PAK-FA/Fifth-Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA); the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation (CAC) J-20; the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA); the Mitsubushi Heavy Industries ATD-X; and the Korea Aerospace Industries KFX.
Of these, only the F-22 has entered service, having made its operational debut with the US Air Force (USAF) in 1998. Still very much the yardstick by which all other fifth-generation aircraft are measured, the F-22 is now coming to the end of its production run with the 195th and final aircraft set to roll off the production line later this year.
Termed 'the drive to 195' by Lockheed Martin, this effort has already seen the final mid-fuselage section delivered to the final assembly line (FAL) in Marietta, Georgia. The final aft-fuselage and wings are expected to arrive at the FAL facility from Boeing in June. Boeing will also be building two additional sets of wings for spares and some elements of the aft fuselage in the event that the air force needs to replace battle-damaged aircraft in the future.
Although production is nearing its end, the evolution of the Raptor's capabilities is not. As Lockheed Martin has proceeded through the aircraft's production runs, the company has incorporated various enhancements to the baseline capability.
"The planes that are rolling off the line now are the most reliable we've ever built and exceed the actual KPPs [key performance parameters] that we were given for mean-time between maintenance," Jeff Babione, vice-president and general manager of the F-22 programme, told during a recent tour of the Fort Worth FAL.
As production has progressed, additional reliability and capability upgrades have been incorporated. Lockheed Martin is currently delivering Increment 2 aircraft to the USAF and is looking at getting a start release for Increment 3.1.
While increment upgrades have, to date, focused on improving the Raptor's air-to-air capability, Increment 3.1 is chiefly concerned with enhancing the aircraft in the air-to-surface role. To this end, Increment 3.1 includes incorporating the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb (the aircraft can carry eight internally and is the only platform that can launch the low-collateral munition supersonically to increase its standoff range to about 90 n miles), synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mapping, geo-location targeting capabilities and an electronic warfare/self-protection capability.
Primarily a software upgrade, Increment 3.1 began development in 2008. Follow-on testing and evaluation started in January 2011 and will continue until mid-2012. The current fleet will then undergo a retrofit, which is set to last until 2017.
Once Increment 3.1 is in place, Lockheed Martin will revert back to improving the Raptor's air-to-air capability with Increment 3.2. This upgrade is planned to integrate the Raytheon AIM-120D Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) and the AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missile onto the aircraft. These missiles will give the aircraft an increased off-boresight capability, which will greatly enhance its lethality.
Other Increment 3.2 improvements include incorporating geo-location targeting capabilities to reduce the time taken to capture an emitter and to put a bomb on target, along with advanced datalinks such as the Multifunction Advanced Data Link (MADL). MADL, which is also earmarked for the Lockheed Martin F-35 and the Northrop Grumman B-2, will enable all the USAF's LO platforms to talk to each other in an 'anti-access environment'. Increment 3.2 is to be fitted to all Block 30 and 35 aircraft - 150 jets in all.
According to Babione, Increment 3.2 will begin to be phased in about 2014. "We believe the customer will ask us to release that [3.2] capability incrementally in two-year timeframes," he said. "The whole point [of these upgrades] is to stay in advance of the threat."
In the meantime, the F-22 is currently the only fifth-generation fighter delivering on its promises of air dominance. To date, the Raptor has been deployed to 20 different locations, from Alaska to the United Arab Emirates, and although there have been concerns raised about its mission-capable rates (mainly as a result of issues surrounding maintaining the aircraft's LO coatings), the type currently boasts the highest tasking as a percentage of any of the fighters in the USAF's fleet. About 10 to 15 per cent of the Raptor force is deployed at any given time.
Even though the F-22 has not yet been fielded in combat, the exercises in which it has participated have proven it to be a more than capable air-dominance platform. During Exercise 'Valiant Shield' in Guam in 2010, the F-22 scored 168 kills against advanced surface and air threats and generated a 90 per cent sortie rate.
However, with production coming to an end and no prospect in sight of the US government re-starting the manufacturing line, Lockheed Martin is beginning to focus its attentions less on the here and now of production and more on the fleet's future sustainability.
The company's key priority right now is in ensuring that the expertise of the F-22 workforce (most of whom have been with the programme from its inception) will not be lost to future maintainers.
Tools of the trade
"One of the key conversations we have had over the past year is: 'What are we going to do with all the tooling?'" Babione said. "The direction from the air force right now is to preserve all 30,000 of the government-owned tools. Many of those will be stored in place at the vendors with some 20,000 being stored in CONEX shipping containers [some of which will be environmentally controlled]. These will be stored at the Sierra Army Depot, California."
As well as preserving its tools, Lockheed Martin has also set about archiving its knowledge by compiling electronic smartbooks for each of the major assembly tools. This is aimed at providing detailed instructions on how to use each tool and will, said Babione, enable maintainers 15 years down the line "to pull out the tool, open the book and know exactly how that tool was used.
"We have learnt from previous programmes that, when we move the tool or production facilities from place to place, then some of that knowledge is lost. We're capturing the knowíledge of our workforce in these smartbooks."
According to Babione, the company is on schedule to deliver the final Raptor in February 2012. "We haven't missed a delivery in more than four-and-a-half years and we don't plan on missing any of the [remaining deliveries]," he said.
With the F-22 production run nearing its end, Lockheed Martin is in the process of diverting resources to its other fifth-generation fighter line: the JSF.
F-35 flight-testing
The F-35 programme is unique in that its system design and development phase is set to run concurrently with production. As such, the flight-test programme recently received its 11th testbed aircraft, while on the manufacturing side the company is now ramping up the production rate and building up the supply chain to achieve the economies of scale that are so critical to achieving the programme's promised long-term savings.
The 11 flight test aircraft comprise four F-35A conventional take-off and landing (CTOL) aircraft, five F-35B short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) aircraft and two F-35C carrier variant (CV) aircraft (with a third CV aircraft set to join the programme in June).
Although the flight-test phase has run into a number of difficulties - the most recent when the fleet was temporarily grounded following an in-flight electric failure on the AF-4 (CTOL) test aircraft - the programme is ahead of schedule across the three variants for the first quarter of 2011, with 199 test flights flown versus a planned 142 flights. With the flight tests now largely proceeding to plan, the company is busy ramping up production capacity to the point whereby it expects to be able to roll out 200 new aircraft a year (compared to the current 51 and 11 per annum for the Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Rafale respectively).
"This high [production] rate gives us economies of scale; it's designed to be an affordable fifth-generation fighter to recapitalise international and US fleets," Dave Scott, Director of F-35 International Customer Engagement, told . In addition to economies of scale, the company has sought to increase the aircraft's affordability through the use of common parts and production techniques.
All three JSF variants feature 100 per cent common avionics and will be fitted with the same Pratt & Whitney F135 engine (an alternative General Electric/Rolls-Royce F136 engine is also under development but its future remains uncertain). There is also a high degree of commonality within the systems and structures across the different versions. All three variants will also be built on the same Fort Worth production line to keep costs to a minimum.
Lockheed Martin sees its global supply chain and manufacturing base as a further cap on costs. "We have best-of-class suppliers throughout the world who are delivering the components for the aircraft - BAE, for example, is building all of the aft fuselages.
"This provides us with a fifth-generation fighter ... with the global co-operation that comes with the programme, linking together the governments and the air forces with the industrial communities," Scott told .
As the programme stands, the US is set to receive 2,443 aircraft (1,763 F-35As for the USAF, 260 F-35Cs for the US Navy and 340 F-35Bs and 80 F-35Cs for the US Marine Corps). The UK (a Level 1 partner) has earmarked 138 F-35Cs for the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy (the actual quantity will be decided in the next Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2015); the Netherlands (a Level 2 partner) will get up to 85 F-35A aircraft; Italy (a Level 2 partner) is set to get 69 F-35A and 62 F-35B aircraft (the Italians will have the only other FAL site outside Fort Worth); Denmark will get 30 F-35As; Norway 48 to 56 F-35As; Turkey 100 F-35As; Australia 100 F-35As; and Canada 65 F-35As or F-35Cs.
With eight international partners committed to buying the aircraft, Lockheed Martin has identified a number of potential Foreign Military Sales (FMS) customers, although any sale would have to be negotiated on a government-to-government basis.
These include Israel, which has signed a letter of offer and acceptance with the US for about 20 aircraft; Singapore, which has been involved in the programme since 2004, funding studies, doing analysis work and examining when and how many aircraft they might buy (like Israel, the country is a Security Co-operations Participant); Japan, which is preparing for a request for proposals to replace some of its earlier model F-4s and F-15s; South Korea, which is examining F-35 and other aircraft for a competition that will likely occur in 2012; Greece, which has received briefings from the US government and has expressed an interest; and Spain, which has funded studies and had its navy look at the compatibility of the F-35B with their aircraft carriers. Finland and Belgium have also asked for, and received, information on the programme.
Besides these, Scott said that any country currently operating the F-16 or F/A-18 will be a potential customer for the F-35 over the next 10 to 15 years.
Beyond the US
While the US is undoubtedly the market leader in the development of the fifth-generation combat aircraft, there are a number of other projects throughout the world that show countries such as Russia, India, China, South Korea and Japan are all working hard to develop their own indigenous platforms in the form of the PAK-FA; FGFA and AMCA; J-20; KFX; and ATD-X respectively.
Of these, only the Russian PAK-FA and the Chinese J-20 have flown so far, the latter of which having made its maiden flight in January this year. The remaining platforms (with the exception of the FGFA, which is derived from the PAK-FA) are all design concepts at this stage and it is not yet clear if development will go ahead.
Even so, the prospect that non-allied nations might soon gain parity with its fighter force has caused the US to look beyond fifth-generation aircraft and to the as-yet-undefined sixth generation.
To this end, the USAF issued a capability request for information (CRfI) towards the end of last year in which it set out its key requirements for an F-22 replacement. This document called for the development of a Next Generation Tactical Aircraft capable of operating in an anti-access/area-denial environment in the 2030-50 timeframe.
To date, only one major defence contractor, Boeing, has admitted publicly to developing such a concept in the form of its F/A-XX. As a long-term replacement for the US Navy's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, the F/A-XX would be a tailless, two-seat, multirole platform that could be flown in either a manned or unmanned configuration.
However, as with all such programmes, sixth-generation fighter development depends as much on funding as it does in developing the technology. When Secretary of the [US] Air Force Michael Donley was asked what it would take to kick-start such a programme, his answer was short and to the point: "More money!"
Boeing has gone beyond fifth-generation aircraft with its proposed F/A-XX sixth-generation combat aircraft. With governmental cutbacks set to take effect, it is unclear if the funding will be in place to develop such a concept.
