US Air Force eyes NGAD deliveries by 2030. Can it be done?

US Air Force eyes NGAD deliveries by 2030. Can it be done?

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.