U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General David Allvin stated in a reportthat the first sixth-generation fighter, designated as the F-47 and intended to secure air superiority, should be ready for its maiden flights in just over two years, by 2028. He emphasized that swift action is needed today and that Boeing must be prepared for this milestone essentially within two and a half years from the signing of the contract.
Allvin also noted that only a few months after Boeing received the contract, the company had already begun production of the first test aircraft.
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From the Defense Express perspective, the goal of a first flight in just two years is highly ambitious. If we take February–March 2028 as the starting point, that actually means nearly three years after the official contract announcement on March 21, 2025. The timing, of course, was not chosen randomly it aligns with the end of Donald Trump's second presidential term.
Whether Boeing can deliver is debatable, especially given the political and symbolic nature of the project (for instance, the F-47 designation curiously matches the fact that Trump is currently the 47th president of the United States). Still, it is worth comparing these deadlines with two major projects from the previous generation the stealth fighters F-22 and F-35.
When it comes to such large-scale programs, it is difficult to reduce everything to a single set of dates. These projects are often drawn-out, overlapping, and have histories spanning decades.
For example, Lockheed Martin's official history of the fifth-generation F-22 Raptor notes that as early as 1981 the U.S. Air Force identified the need for a new air superiority fighter to replace the F-15. Six years later, in 1987, competitors were selected for the Advanced Tactical Fighter program. Three years after that, in 1990, the YF-22 and YF-23 prototypes flew.
In 1991, the Lockheed-Boeing-General Dynamics team was declared the ATF winner, and on September 7, 1997, the first fifth-generation fighter made its maiden flight. In other words, it took just under six years from contract award to first flight.
As for the F-35, the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program that produced it drew from multiple fighter projects of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, Boeing and Lockheed Martin were selected to build prototypes the X-32 and X-35. In October 2001, Lockheed Martin was announced as the winner, and five years later, in December 2006, the F-35A designated AA-1 flew for the first time (after being completed in February 2006). The first production aircraft flew in February 2011 and was formally delivered to the U.S. Air Force in March.
By comparison, targeting a first F-47 flight in 2028 is a very ambitious goal. Considering that the planned in-service date for the aircraft has only been vaguely defined as sometime in the 2030s, it is not unlikely that the first flight date could slip to the right. A test version may indeed fly within two years, but possibly without its new engine and only as a stripped-down variant.
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