Rebutting doubters that the Air Force is on the cusp of a new digital revolution, service acquisition chief Will Roper revealed at AFA's September virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference that a secret prototype of USAF's next fighter-designed and built using the digital thread method-is already flying. "If you think we don't care about physical world results, we do," Roper said in a slickly produced keynote speech. The Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, meant to complement or succeed the F-22 and F-35, he said, "has come so far that the full-scale flight demonstrator has already flown in the physical world. It's broken a lot of records in the doing."
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