https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2 ... et/168479/ The U.S. Air Force has secretly built and flown a prototype new fighter jet that could become the military’s top combat aircraft.
Will Roper, the head of Air Force acquisition, revealed the existence of the new jet, which he said was part of the service’s Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, project, during a video presentation at the Air Force Association’s Air Space Cyber virtual conference on Tuesday.
“NGAD right now is designing, assembling, testing in the digital world, exploring things that would have cost time and money to wait for physical world results,” Roper said. “NGAD has come so far that the full-scale flight demonstrator has already flown in the physical world. It’s broken a lot of records in the doing.”
Roper did not provide any more details of the jet, which is presumed to be the Pentagon’s first “sixth-generation” tactical aircraft after the fifth-gen F-22 and F-35 jets