Though no photos of the aircraft have emerged, it is known that a full-scale demonstrator aircraft has flown. In 2020, the USAF's then top acquisition official, Dr Will Roper, said: "NGAD right now is designing, assembling, testing, and, in the digital world, exploring things that would have cost us time and money to wait for physical world results... The announcement isn't that we just built an e-plane and have flown it a lot of times in a virtual world, which we've done. But if you think that we don't care about physical-world results, we do. In fact, NGAD has come so far that the full-scale flight demonstrator has already flown in the physical world. We've already built and flown a full-scale flight demonstrator in the real world, and we broke records in doing it. We are ready to go and build the next-generation aircraft in a way that has never happened before."
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