Inside Boeing’s sprawling defense campus in St. Louis, workers have begun assembling the first F-47, the sixth-generation fighter the U.S. Air Force is counting on to eventually retire the F-22 Raptor and restore its edge in air superiority. The program carries an estimated price tag of roughly $20 billion, making it one of the largest combat-aircraft investments since the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
The assembly milestone, confirmed through a May 2026 visit by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, places the most consequential American fighter program in a generation squarely on the factory floor where Boeing already builds the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the F-15EX Eagle II.
How the F-47 got its name and its mission
President Trump and Hegseth formally designated the aircraft as the F-47 during a White House announcement earlier this year, following the Air Force’s traditional fighter-numbering sequence. The designation signals that the service views the jet as a clean generational leap beyond the F-22 and F-35, not an incremental upgrade.
The F-47 emerged from the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, a secretive effort that pitted Boeing against Lockheed Martin for the right to build the service’s future air-superiority platform. Boeing’s selection was a significant upset. Lockheed Martin had built every U.S. stealth fighter to date, from the F-117 Nighthawk through the F-22 and F-35. Losing the NGAD contract marked the first time in decades that another company won a premier fighter competition.
Air Force officials have described the F-47 as offering improvements in range, stealth, and long-term sustainability over the F-22, though no specific performance figures have been released publicly. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin referenced those three capability areas in remarks surrounding the announcement but stopped short of providing quantified benchmarks.
Why St. Louis matters
Senator Schmitt’s office stated explicitly that the next-generation fighter aircraft will be made in Boeing St. Louis, confirming the production site during what officials called the “Arsenal of Freedom Tour.” The visit placed a senior senator and the Pentagon’s top civilian leader on the factory floor together, a deliberate signal of political commitment to the program and the region.
St. Louis offers Boeing a concentrated base of skilled labor, tooling infrastructure, and supplier networks built up over decades of fighter production. The same campus has turned out thousands of F-15 and F/A-18 variants. But the F-47 will demand manufacturing techniques, composite materials, and stealth coatings that go well beyond what those legacy programs require. Boeing’s recent experience with the T-7A Red Hawk trainer, which has faced production delays at the same site, is a reminder that new programs do not automatically benefit from existing infrastructure.
The F-22 problem the F-47 must solve
The F-22 Raptor has served as the Air Force’s premier air-dominance fighter since reaching initial operational capability in 2005, but the fleet is under strain. Originally planned at 750 aircraft, the program was cut to just 187 due to cost overruns and shifting post-Cold War priorities. Today, maintenance costs are climbing, airframe availability is declining, and the jet’s 1990s-era avionics are increasingly expensive to upgrade.
Meanwhile, China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force has expanded its fleet of J-20 stealth fighters and is reportedly developing a next-generation successor of its own. The strategic calculus is straightforward: if the F-22 continues to age without a replacement reaching operational squadrons, the United States risks losing the qualitative advantage in air combat it has held since the Raptor entered service.
The Air Force has not published a date for the last F-22 to leave service or for the first operational F-47 squadron to stand up. That gap matters. The F-22 itself took eight years from first flight in 1997 to IOC in 2005, and the NGAD program has already absorbed years of design and prototyping work. Any further delays in the F-47’s path from assembly to flight testing could leave the service relying on a shrinking Raptor fleet longer than planned.
The drone wingman factor
The F-47 is not designed to fight alone. The Air Force’s NGAD vision pairs the crewed fighter with autonomous Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs), uncrewed drones that would fly alongside the F-47 to extend its sensor reach, carry additional weapons, and absorb risk. The service has awarded CCA development contracts to Anduril Industries and General Atomics, with early flight testing underway on those platforms as well.
How tightly the F-47 and its CCA wingmen are integrated will shape the jet’s ultimate combat effectiveness. A sixth-generation fighter flying with a swarm of loyal wingmen represents a fundamentally different concept of air warfare than a single-seat jet operating on its own. But that integration adds software complexity, communication-link challenges, and coordination problems that have never been solved at scale in a contested environment.
What the $20 billion covers, and what it does not
The roughly $20 billion figure associated with the F-47 has appeared in official announcements and has been widely reported by outlets including Reuters and Bloomberg. However, no detailed cost-breakdown document has been published. Whether that total covers only engineering and manufacturing development or also includes initial production lots and sustainment funding is not specified in any available public record.
Defense analysts tracking the program should treat the number with caution until formal budget justification documents appear in a future congressional submission. Large fighter programs routinely see cost growth as designs mature and production scales up. The F-35 program, for comparison, has seen lifetime cost estimates balloon to well over $1 trillion when sustainment is included.
Assembly floor is not the finish line
The confirmation that the first F-47 has reached the assembly floor is a tangible milestone, but it leaves significant distance to cover. Boeing has not issued a formal production update, and no independent reporting from inside the factory has surfaced to clarify how far along the first airframe actually is. “Rolled onto the assembly floor” can describe anything from initial structural mating to final systems integration, and those stages carry very different implications for the timeline to first flight.
What is clear is that the political machinery behind the F-47 is fully engaged. The White House, the Pentagon, and key members of Congress have publicly staked credibility on the program. Political commitment of that scale tends to insulate a weapons system from the budget battles that killed or curtailed earlier fighters, including the F-22 itself. Whether it can also insulate the F-47 from the engineering risks that have delayed nearly every advanced fighter program in modern history is the question that will define the next several years in St. Louis.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
