The Air Force is focused on avoiding the mistakes that plagued past programs like the F-35, such as not obtaining rights to all the sustainment data from the contractor building the Next Generation Air Dominance platform (NGAD).
This includes ensuring the Air Force has access to all the sustainment data it needs from the contractor and using modular open system design to allow the Air Force to bring in new and different suppliers as it seeks to upgrade parts of the system. The Air Force plans to choose a single contractor to build NGAD sometime in 2024, with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman expected to compete.
The Air Force is also working with several suppliers to create autonomous drone wingmen associated with collaborative combat aircraft (CCA). NGAD's origins date back to the Obama administration, when he asked the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to study what the Air Force needed to dominate the skies in a future war.
DARPA launched the Aerospace Innovation Initiative to develop technologies for a sixth-generation fighter. This led to the creation of experimental prototype aircraft, X-planes, and advances in model-based systems engineering and digitalization. Government designers and bidding companies are now working side-by-side at Wright-Patterson, with direct access to the databases companies are using to design their pitches. This is a more efficient approach than how acquisitions were run in the past.