The F-47, the United States Air Force’s next-generation fighter jet, has begun production, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said.
The first of the new stealth fighters is expected to be operational by 2028, Allvin said during a September 2025 keynote speech at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Air Force announced the F-47’s engineering and manufacturing contract award in March 2025, and Boeing is now producing the initial airframe.
“In the few short months since we made the announcement, they are already beginning to manufacture the first article,” Allvin said, according to Air & Space Forces magazine. “We’re ready to go fast. We have to go fast.”
The F-47 will replace the F-22 Raptor and is the first U.S. sixth-generation fighter jet to enter production, according to a U.S. Air Force news release. U.S. Air Force leaders say they plan to field the aircraft by the 2030s and will buy at least 185 of the planes.
New features include updated sensors and long-range strike capabilities. The aircraft will have a combat radius of more than 1,800 kilometers — nearly double that of the F-22 — and a top speed above Mach 2. Upgraded systems will provide enhanced survivability and lethality, including greater stealth capabilities, Allvin said.
The F-47 is being developed under the U.S. Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) initiative aimed a fielding a system to replace the Raptor with “an integrated and resilient high-capacity battle management command, control, and communications network to address asymmetries in long-range intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,” according to a U.S. Congress news release. The F-47 is the centerpiece of this effort and will be supported by interoperable uncrewed collaborative systems enabled with AI capabilities.
The F-47 is “the platform that, along with all of the rest of the systems, is going to ensure dominance into the future.” Allvin said. Its design is based on experimental aircraft, called
X-planes, developed by the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to evaluate new technologies and aerodynamic concepts. The X-planes first began flight testing in 2019, according to a DARPA news release. “For the past five years, the X-planes for this aircraft have been quietly laying the foundation for the F-47 — flying hundreds of hours, testing cutting-edge concepts, and proving that we can push the envelope of technology with confidence,” Allvin said in the DARPA news release.
“Air dominance is not a birthright, but it’s become synonymous with American airpower, but our dominance needs to be earned every single day,” Allvin said during the contract announcement at the White House. “Since the earliest days of aerial warfare, brave American Airmen have jumped into their machines, taken to the air, and they’ve cleared the skies. That’s been our commitment to the fight, and that’s really been our promise to America, and with this F-47 we’re going to be able to keep that promise well into the future.”