The U.S. Air Force is conducting flight tests of its Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) jet built under a secretive project intended to include jets and drones.
Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Will Roper revealed today that the service has built a full-scale prototype of the NGAD fighter.
Digital engineering helped accelerate pace of the project, he said. “NGAD right now is designing, assembling, testing in the digital world [and] exploring things that would have cost us time and money to wait for physical-world results,” he said during a keynote address at the virtual Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber conference.
“The NGAD has come so far that the full-scale flight demonstrator has already flown in the physical world. All I can say is that the NGAD test flights have been amazing. Records have been broken,” the official said.
It is not known whether the NDAG aircraft is even manned or unmanned