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.

It really is an achievement to go from concept to first flight in a year for a modern aircraft.

When you don't design by committee, you can do things in a much quicker fashion. However, once people find out about it, they are going to start requesting a lot of changes because it's not the design they wanted.

The initial F-16 project faced that issue and the Fighter Mafia was pretty successful in preventing scope/mission creep.

Also true for all software projects.

That's exactly why I worded it without referencing airplanes. It's kind of a universal statement about committees.

My theory: In any organization there is a magic number of committee members, that once achieved, assures that the project will fail.

I was just thinking about this the other day when reading the comments on small nuclear reactors and how many organizations, governments and countries can't accomplish anything of significance in a timely, costly or efficient manner.

I was thinking it should be written like a law:

The success of a project or goal is inversely proportional to the number stakeholders, investors and/or general labour involved in the project/business/goal.

This idea is closely related to the 80/20 rule, the cost/performance/quality decision triangle, etc.

The mythical man month.

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.

Not knowing anything about aircraft development, they are probably much less ambitious about design specs while at the same time iterated much faster.

There are many lessons to be found within Skunk Works by Rich.

Among them is the statement that the SR-71 was not at the edge of the design envelope. If I recall correctly, there were substantial safety margins in most areas, "like a Chevy truck" in order to ensure the speed of development and improve the likelihood that the entire project would succeed.

The HN productivity/self-help crowd will find a lot more in there.

This passage has had the highest personal impact per word as any text I've read: You don't need Harvard to teach you that it's more important to listen than to talk. You can get straight As from all your Harvard profs, but you'll never make the grade unless you're decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision. The final thing you need to know is don't half-heartedly wound problems - kill them dead. That's all there is to it. Now you can run this goddamn place.

Also: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-are...

>You can get straight As from all your Harvard profs, but you'll never make the grade unless you're decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision

What I wrote in my journal after joining an investment bank's equity research team:

"Good dinner with two traders, x and y; they have both been in the business for more than a decade and shared many interesting experiences and insights into the business. I did not realize that our traders very much need information flow, preferably proprietary, in order to entice their buyside counterparts to trade through them. It almost doesn't matter whether the information is accurate or not; what counts is being distinctive".

I well remember one of the traders slamming his fist on the table complaining about how a former analyst was very bad at returning phone calls, and saying that being 52% right (meaning 48% wrong) is better than a higher correct percentage but not being available.

SpaceX also did the COTS thing to great effect.

Yeah, but the defense budget is optimized to benefit multiple Congressional districts as a jobs program, this doesn't work...

The original article says that they aren't trying to reduce spending. They want to take money that used to go into long-term maintenance and put it into into R&D and manufacturing. Instead of keeping the planes flying for 30+ years, they want a steady stream of new, up-to-date specialized designs that they keep in the air for 13 years or less. They want to force China and Russia to play a never ending game of catch-up.

It would be a shake-up in the current system, but is fully compatible with running a nationwide jobs program.

It also means opponents have thirteen different aircraft they have to train against!

In theory if the cycles are faster, and not 30+ years, there's not so much pressure to make sure everyone gets a piece of the pie. If you're churning out brand new planes every decade, you can stagger the spread.

Indeed, awarding lots of smaller contracts instead of a few big ones would seem to be a good way to ensure more people get a piece of the pie.

Lots more detail in the original article this one links to: https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/09/15/the-us-...

Yeah, that's a really good article, and discloses that what they're doing isn't about a single new airplane. They want to completely change the way the Air Force manages the entire airplane lifecycle:

> The main difference is that the Air Force would flip from spending the majority of fighter program costs upfront instead of at the end of the aircraft’s life. To continuously design new fighter jets, the service would keep multiple vendors constantly under contract for the development of new planes, choosing a new design about every eight years. To make a business case that is profitable for industry, it would then buy batches of about 50-80 aircraft every year.

> The result is a 25 percent increase in development costs and an 18 percent increase in production costs. However, the price of modernizing aircraft would drop by 79 percent while sustainment costs are basically cut in half, Roper wrote in the paper.

> “I can’t make both ends of the life cycle go away; industry has to make a profit somewhere,” Roper said. “And I’m arguing in the paper that if you get to choose what color of money you use for future air superiority, make it research, development and production because it’s the sharp point of the spear, not the geriatric side that consumes so much of our resources today.”

If a figher plane has a lifespan of 30 years, does this mean that at steady state, the air force would have 1500 - 2400 fighters of 30 different types?

Did Hayao Miyazaki take over Air Force procurement, or what?

EDIT: Ah, they also reduce the lifecycle to 10 - 15 years. Still wild!

I don't think you should be downvoted, it's a reasonable misunderstanding.

The goal is to create a constant pipeline of new planes with short lead times, so that they don't need to have extended lifetimes with expensive maintenance. Personally I feel that's a better approach overall for many mobile capital-intensive systems: military hardware, public transportation and so on.

As the interview points out, smaller, more-frequent procurements reduce the risk to suppliers as well. Currently every weapons system project is a existential risk to contractors, so they quite naturally try to push as much back as possible. And so we wind up with parts being built in every Congressional district at vast expense and added complexity.

USAF has just over 5,600 aircraft in service total, about 5,000 manned, per Wikipedia. There have been about 1,200 F-15s (all variants) built, 555 F-35s, 195 F-22s, and 4,600 F-16s. Not all built aircraft remain in service, nor are all in the US armed forces.

Your count at least seems reasonable.

> and perhaps give SpaceX founder Elon Musk a shot at designing an F-35 competitor.

This suggests an utter lack of familiarity with the motivations and capabilities of Musk and SpaceX. Or perhaps they merely needed some text for the link, even if it was silly text?

I think if you put "Elon Musk" in double quotes this makes a lot more sense. SpaceX completely changed the launch costs for the Air Force and NASA. It makes sense they would try to replicate that experience elsewhere.

> We don’t know which defense contractor designed and prototyped the new jet, though it's almost certainly one of the big aerospace giants (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing).

Wouldn't it be interesting if this isn't true tho. What if there's some stealthy startup out there trying to SpaceX the rest of the defense industry?

Honestly I'd be even more surprised if it was one of the established giants because what a turnaround that would be.

> AII's goals include strengthening the critically important design teams in the defense industrial base and reducing the lead time for future systems.[1]

Apropos a 2015 DARPA program leading to flight demonstrators. So acquisition innovation to improve innovation acquisition.

[1] https://aviationweek.com/shows-events/afa-air-space-cyber-co...

Ah, so "and perhaps give a shot at designing an F-35 competitor to someone like SpaceX founder Elon Musk"... hmm.

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.

They can if they need to... Both the U2 and the SR71 had a crazy short development time - months, not years. The history of both those aircraft from a build/design perspective is an amazing read. They knew the U2 would be obsolete for the original mission and got the blackbird in the air. Got to wonder if it is just significantly harder to hide things now than it was in the late 50's. Between satellites, cell phones, and globs of potential collaboration - it would be hard to keep something in the air a secret.

http://www.roadrunnersinternationale.com/sr-71timeline.pdf

The irony is that the U-2 is still in service while the SR-71 is decommissioned.

This doesn't take away from your point of course, I just thought it was interesting.

[1] maybe. How do you counter a fast follower with a knack for getting onto your development network?

Misdirection and rapid development would be my guess.

[1] https://warisboring.com/collision-course-china-claims-f-22-a...

Would love to hear if the Air Force Kessel Run program contributed to this [1] [2] (cc @AndrewKemendo).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23703326

[2] https://kesselrun.af.mil/

I've only heard good things about that program; if they somehow contributed to this effort, it would be another huge feather in their hat.

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.

Wouldn't a vast number of cheap remote controlled/ai driven flying explosives be more useful?

So basically they could do this because of limited budget, right schedule and no red tapes? Sound like a start up to me :)

Not knowing much of anything about it, it's kinda hard to figure out how much of an achievement this is...