“The person who can change sustainment can change the acquisition game, writ large.”įor the Air Force, the turning point is when an aircraft hits 15 years old.
The account is a black hole that no one can figure out,” Eaglen said.
“The sustainment account is a black hole that nobody understands. The companies are finally able to turn a profit during the later years of a program, when they become locked in as sustainment providers with the technical knowledge necessary for upgrading, repairing and extending the life of their product - often with little congressional interest or scrutiny. The result is that every fighter program becomes existential for companies, who fight to prove that they can meet technical requirements during the development and production phase at a lower cost than their competitors. The time it takes the Air Force to move a new fighter from research and development to full-rate production has stretched from a matter of years to multiple decades. industrial base has dwindled from 10 manufacturers capable of building an advanced fighter to only three defense companies: Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. “I have to imagine there will be a lot of engineers - maybe famous ones with well-known household names with billions of dollars to invest - that will decide starting the world’s greatest aircraft company to build the world’s greatest aircraft with the Air Force is exactly the kind of inspiring thing they want to do as a hobby or even a main gig,” Roper said. Should the Air Force move to buy NGAD in the near term, it will be adding a challenger to the F-35 and F-15EX programs, potentially putting those programs at risk.Īnd because the advanced manufacturing techniques that are critical for building NGAD were pioneered by the commercial sector, the program could open the door for new prime contractors for the aircraft to emerge - and perhaps give SpaceX founder Elon Musk a shot at designing an F-35 competitor. The program itself has the potential to radically shake up the defense industry. The Air Force awarded a nearly $1.2 billion contract to Boeing for its first lot of eight F-15EX fighter aircraft on July 13, 2020. And he refused to divulge any aspect of the aircraft’s design - its mission, whether it was uncrewed or optionally crewed, whether it could fly at hypersonic speeds or if it has stealth characteristics. He wouldn’t say when or where the first flight occurred. Roper declined to comment on how many prototype aircraft have been flown or which defense contractors manufactured them. “We are ready to go and build the next-generation aircraft in a way that has never happened before.”Īlmost 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. “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.