Spoiler: they don't know anything about it, no pictures and no specs. The company that worked on it is not revealed. Really the most notable thing is that it took only a year. The P-51 Mustang was conceived and put into service (wartime) also in a year.<p>It really is an achievement to go from concept to first flight in a year for a modern aircraft.
I have no special knowledge, but I find myself wondering if it's just a variant of an existing fighter (F-22, F-35, maybe even F-23) or a manned variant of a recent drone prototype like the X-47B.
Reminds me of what I read from the memoir on Skunkwork. They specifically used off the shell components and other strategies to reduce engineering time and speed up prototyping.<p>Not knowing anything about aircraft development, they are probably much less ambitious about design specs while at the same time iterated much faster.
Lots more detail in the original article this one links to: <a href="https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-air-force-has-built-and-flown-a-mysterious-full-scale-prototype-of-its-future-fighter-jet/" rel="nofollow">https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-...</a>
Given that a warplane has not been developed so quickly since WW2, part of me wonders if there has recently been some development which has given the air force a wartime sense of urgency. While it seems unlikely that we wouldn't hear anything about such a development, it also seemed unlikely that we wouldn't hear about a project like this.
Would love to hear if the Air Force Kessel Run program contributed to this [1] [2] (cc @AndrewKemendo).<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23703326" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23703326</a><p>[2] <a href="https://kesselrun.af.mil/" rel="nofollow">https://kesselrun.af.mil/</a>
Would be interesting to hear more details on how they pulled that off. I would tend to assume the fast development speed involves using a bunch of existing tech instead of developing new. Maybe it's also unmanned, letting them drop a ton of life-support stuff and relax reliability requirements.
I would think at this point we don't really need fighter jets.<p>Wouldn't a vast number of cheap remote controlled/ai driven flying explosives be more useful?