F-47 Won’t Be Available Until Mid-2030s, Top Lawmaker Says

The Air Force’s sixth-generation F-47 and the Navy’s F/A-XX fighter won’t be “available” until the mid-2030s, a leading congressman said March 17, which will require the services to keep older jets flying in the interim.

“The question then becomes, what do we do in the meantime?” Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., said at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference. Wittman is chair of the House Armed Services Committee’s tactical air and land forces subcommittee. “We have to maintain a fleet of [Navy] F-18s, and then we have to maintain the F-22 [Raptors]. … That’s the only way we create that bridge to the sixth-generation aircraft” like the Air Force’s F-47 and the Navy’s planned F/A-XX.

The Boeing-made F-47 will replace the Air Force’s fleet of roughly 185 F-22s sometime in the next decade. It is expected to have advanced stealth capabilities, a combat radius of more than 1,000 nautical miles, the capability to fly at speeds topping Mach 2, and the ability to fly alongside semi-autonomous drones known as Collaborative Combat Aircraft.

Top Air Force leaders have set an ambitious goal to have the F-47 flying sometime in 2028, which would be about three years after the March 2025 contract award to Boeing. The F-35, by comparison, had its first flight in 2006, five years after Lockheed Martin beat Boeing to win the Joint Strike Fighter contract.

Air Force Gen. Dale White, who oversees some of the service’s most critical programs as Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Critical Major Weapon Systems, declined to comment at the McAleese conference when asked what stage the F-47 program will be in the mid-2030s.

The first flight goal of 2028 remains unchanged, White said, and he expressed confidence in the progression of the F-47.

White also said that the Air Force is taking a greater role in developing the government reference architecture for the F-47, which he said will pay dividends in the future. A government reference architecture is a road map for a program that the government provides, which guides its design, development, production, and sustainment processes.

“We needed to bring the government back into engineering,” White said. “We had outsourced engineering for so long. And so being able to do that, actually have a government reference architecture in partnership with industry … allowed us to have more continuous competition, avoiding vendor lock. But at the same time, we now have a contract by which we can evolve capability.”

Former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin told lawmakers in May 2025 that the Air Force has taken more control over the F-47 and ownership of its mission systems, in part by establishing a government reference architecture. This is the service’s effort to avoid what it views as a painful mistake during the F-35 acquisition process, in which Lockheed Martin retained the rights to critical data on the jet. 

Industry’s cooperation was critical to building the foundation needed to define the F-47’s government reference architecture, White said.

And that architecture can be used by other programs, he said, including other services’ systems.

“That’s going to be the foundation of our future,” White said. “The architecture we use on CCA, we use on F-47, [and] the other services are leveraging it. So you’re going to see more of it.”