Bring on the F-47 Fighter Jet
President Trump was in the Oval Office on Friday next to a poster of a mist-shrouded new U.S. fighter jet, which he says will be called the F-47 and built by Boeing. The U.S. Air Force desperately needs modern equipment, and credit the President for his support. Now comes the hard part: putting up the money to field airframes in numbers that match the world's threats.
'The F-47 will be the most advanced, most capable, most lethal aircraft ever built,' Mr. Trump said, with his usual understatement. The Air Force has been working on the concept under the Next Generation Air Dominance program, and the details are classified. But Mr. Trump said an experimental aircraft has been flying secretly for almost five years and exploits advances in stealth technology. 'America's enemies will never see it coming,' he said.
The Air Force calls the aircraft 'a family of systems,' and in plain English that means piloted planes working with drones. The service has been developing such Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) that could, say, scoot out ahead of manned planes and conduct jamming or launch weapons, among many other potential missions.
Why not go fully unmanned with the F-47? The 'technology is not there yet,' as Mark Gunzinger of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies puts it. But CCAs can join the fleet at scale in short order and work with existing aircraft like the F-35. Mitchell wargaming has found the drone wingmen are valuable in helping the Air Force disrupt and strike Chinese air defenses in a fight for Taiwan.
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