The US Air Force Material Command could have revealed the (delta) shape of USAF NGAD in a today tweet to celebrate the 73rd birthday of the service.
As we have recently reported, a new fighter jet prototype that could become the US Air Force (USAF) top combat aircraft has been secretly built and flown by the service, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics Dr. Will Roper revealed on Sep. 15, 2020 during the virtual 2020 Air, Space and Cyber conference.
According to Roper the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD, as the project is currently named) features a network of advanced fighter aircraft, sensors and weapons in a growing and unpredictable threat environment, defying the traditional categorization of a single platform.
He said: “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. 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.”
The upcoming sixth generation fighter aircraft is presumed to be the USAF’s successor to the fifth-gen F-22 and F-35 fighter jets.
Roper did not provide specifics on the project. He only said that the new aircraft was conceived using digital engineering, which allows the service to bypass the regular manufacturing process for parts and gives developers more flexibility to design and change blueprints. The USAF announced on Sep. 14, 2020 that any weapon made using digital concepts will have an “e-” prefix in an effort to showcase these innovative processes.
Now, as noted by Scramble Magazine on its Facebook page, the US Air Force Material Command (AFMC) could have revealed the (delta) shape of USAF NGAD in a today tweet to celebrate the 73rd birthday of the service.
Is the image featured in the Tweet a first glance to the NGAD prototype? We can assume it is, but stay tuned for additional images and updates if further details on this story had to come to light!
Photo credit: U.S. Air Force
