At the end of his video presentation to the Air Force Association's virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference on September 15, 2020, Dr Will Roper the then Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics stole the show by revealing the service had flown a demonstrator aircraft for the Next Generation Air Dominance programme. Dubbed NGAD, pronounced en-gad, the programme seeks to develop and field a family of connected systems that could include fighters, unmanned loyal wingman aircraft to carry extra weapons and conduct other missions, and networked platforms, the latter capable of operating in the space or cyber domains.
According to Roper, test flights had demonstrated the aircraft to be ‘amazing’ and the programme in its entirety had broken many records, but he said little else.
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