15.10.2022, 13:03
Zitat:US Air Force eyes NGAD deliveries by 2030. Can it be done?https://www.defensenews.com/air/2022/09/...t-be-done/
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The U.S. Air Force’s secretive, next-generation fighter platform is still in the design process and has not formally entered its engineering, manufacturing and development stage, the service’s secretary said this month. [...] The acknowledgment marks a step back from June, when Frank Kendall publicly said the highly classified Next Generation Air Dominance program had already hit the key milestone. “We have now started on the EMD program to do the development aircraft that we’re going to take into production,” he said during a Heritage Foundation event at the time. It also has some experts wondering if the service can meet its goal of delivering the first iterations of the sixth-generation fighter by the end of this decade. [...]
The service is still designing NGAD, Kendall said, and the program has not yet gone through the Milestone B review process. That milestone marks the completion of a program’s technology maturation phase and the formal start of an acquisition program, when the service takes its preliminary design and focuses on system integration, manufacturing processes and other details ahead of production. Kendall’s June comments, in which he also said the Air Force would deliver some NGAD capabilities by the end of the decade, surprised some in the aviation world and suggested the program was further along in the process than initially thought. Several defense publications, including Defense News, reported on his comments at the time as indicating NGAD had formally entered the EMD phase. [...]
Kendall’s acknowledgment that NGAD has not entered the EMD phase, much less finished the design process, raises the possibility the program might not reach initial operating capability by the end of the decade, Heritage Foundation think tank fellow and former Air Force fighter pilot John Venable told Defense News. [...] “It could happen [by 2030], but the odds are against it happening” by then, he said.
Schneemann