Originally Posted by
West Coast
USAF leadership is on record of recent saying the next generation fighter (my presumption being an eventual replacement for the F22) has already flown. Think it would be off to restart the F22 line given this.
All of the speculation about this comes from a statement made to Defense News in September by USAF's top acquisition official. ALL he said was that a "Demonstrator" had flown and that they had broken records doing it. He did NOT say it was a production-ready craft or even a prototype. There was no information about what it was, what it did, how representative of an operational aircraft it might be, if at all. The "records" could be how they did it, how fast they did it (you can move really fast in the Black world) if Virtual Reality or Artificial Intelligence was used, if it was an advanced unmanned platform, the type of construction, how it flew, how it achieved any stealth it might have, etc.
For example, look up TACIT BLUE. That was a demonstrator, not an operational craft or a prototype of anything. We're probably seeing something similar here. Still impressive, but not something that's going to be filling the flight lines in a few years.