“We’re doing exceptionally well,” Dale White told reporters at AFA’s Warfare Symposium. White serves as the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Critical Major Weapon Systems, overseeing the F-47 and other major Air Force initiatives.
Then-Chief of Staff David W. Allvin first articulated the goal of a 2028 first flight in September 2025. Roughly half a year later, White said the timeline remains on track.
White said Boeing has invested in the program and remained ahead of potential problems despite recent challenges in its commercial aviation business and work on the KC-46 Pegasus refueler. “Boeing has done a really good job of ramping up the personnel piece,” White said.
“In the early phases of these programs … you typically watch the personnel ramp against the timeline and activities you have to get done,” he said. “They’ve done very well with that.”
The Air Force has said the F-47 will have a combat radius of more than 1,000 nautical miles and be capable of flying at speeds greater than Mach 2. The service plans to acquire more than 185 aircraft to match its current F-22 fleet, with the possibility of exceeding that figure.
The F-47’s projected combat radius would be nearly double that of the F-22, the Air Force’s current top air superiority fighter. The F-22 was selected as the winner of the Advanced Tactical Fighter contest in 1991 and first flew a production model six years later.
The timeline for the F-47 is faster than many other crewed aviation programs, though the effort builds on earlier work. The Pentagon began the program that became the Next-Generation Air Dominance fighter in the 2010s, flying experimental X-plane prototypes that preceded the jet.
“We really got a head start on that program, which has paid off tremendously over time,” White said. He added that the first F-47 airframe is already under production and that the program remains “on time and on target.”
Source: Air & Space Forces Magazine.
