Lockheed reveals bold technology plans with 6th-gen fighter concept

Flight International ^ | 01/04/2012 | Stephen Trimble

[sukhoi-30mki]

Lockheed reveals bold technology plans with 6th-gen fighter concept

By: Stephen Trimble Washington DC

Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works division has revealed a conceptual next-generation fighter design that offers the first hints of an ambitious, long-term technology strategy for the new class of tactical aircraft that will emerge after 2030.

The concept - published in a 2012 calendar distributed to journalists - indicates the company will continue to seek new breakthroughs in performance despite the risk-averse culture of today's weapons buyers in the US military.

Featuring an F-22-like nose, an unusually contoured wing and nearly flat canted tails, the concept suggests a new level of speed and agility.

©LOCKHEED MARTIN

Lockheed also seemed to take a thinly-veiled shot at a next generation fighter concept released in September by Boeing, which showed a manned and optionally manned, tailless fighter with a conventional wing.

"Simply removing the pilot from an aircraft or introducing incremental improvements in signature and range does not constitute a generational leap in capability," Lockheed said in response to Flightglobal's questions.

"These improvements are already being looked att for our fifth generation fighters," the company added.

Instead, possible technologies for a next-generation fighter should include "greatly increased speed", more range and new features like self-healing structures and multi-spectral stealth, the company said.

Such capabilities must be supported by new breakthroughs in propulsion, materials, power generation and weapons, Lockheed said, adding some of these are "yet to be fully imagined".

Lockheed acknowledged that breakthrough performance will not come cheap.

"This will require another significant investment in research and development from a standpoint of time and money," the company said.

So far, USAF leaders have not been committal about plans for a sixth-generation fighter to replace the F-22 after 2030. The air force is instead focused on buying 1,763 F-35As to replace the F-16 and A-10 fleets. New development funding is largely devoted to fielding a next generation bomber by the end of the decade.

Meanwhile, the USAF has initiated the first steps towards working on a next generation fighter. In November 2010, the Air Combat Command asked companies to submit ideas for the technologies and performance for a new fighter that would appear in 20 years. The Air Force Research Laboratory also is funding research on basic technologies that could feed into a sixth generation fighter programme.

[Norm Lenhart]

YaEEEESSS!

I anxiously await the day when Mr. And Mrs. America realize that security clearances at bases and defense contractors aren’t designed so much to stop Chineese esponiage, but are the only “legal” way to keep Greenies out of/and from litigating any progress we CAN make technologically.

People should ponder the deeper meanings of that at their next yoga session.

[Norm Lenhart]

TeH SeX! Someone flattened and shrunk an SR71 ;)

Short story... Daughter is AF and works with all the cool new semi-invesible flying things. She hadn’t ever seen a 71 in real life until we went to the Museum/graveyard in AZ.

She stood mouth agape at that piece of 1950s tech for some time. Amazing what we can do when we really want to.

[TheBattman]

I saw my first SR-71 in the flesh a few summers back. For basically “ancient” design and technology- its still pretty incredible.

[Norm Lenhart]

For SR fans, there’s a book called “Sled Driver” by one of the pilots. It’s a limited edition and VERY expensive. Excerpts are available online. The stories of that thing over Libya are incredible.

I’’ll see if I can find the link.

[Secret Agent Man]

These are only the planes they want us to know about.

[Norm Lenhart]

Right here on FR ;)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-vetscor/1981814/posts

[Secret Agent Man]

Probably overall the best plane ever made, comparing a majority of different performance parameters.

[Prokopton]

In the year 2054, the entire defence budget will purchase just one aircraft.

If things don't change, in 2054 the entire revenue of the United States will be used to pay interest on our debt. There will be no defence budget.

[TXnMA]

"I could imagine a turn so sharp it could snap the neck or pop out the eyeballs."

You just described how it it that unmanned missiles can hit even the best human-piloted aircraft...

[STD]

You could ask the Akanaki for use of their 188 generation death star

[Yo-Yo]

I need a [link] to the pic. The one in the story is broken.

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2012/01/04/LMT%20Fighter%20560.jpg

[GonzoGOP]

Make them autonomous. A large part of the cost of any AC project is man-rating it.

If you think that man-rating a vehicle is expensive, then you haven't tried making one truly autonomous. Watch the Great Robot Race and Great Robot Race 2, they are out on YouTube. They were just trying to get an autonomous robot to drive through traffic. A simple task, yet the state of the art million dollar bots routinely drove into buildings, crashed into each other and freaked out at stop signs. And while I haven't experienced air to air combat I'm thinking it a bit more chaotic and fast paced than a drive to the corner grocery.

But making a drone autonomous, even when it becomes possible to do it, also makes them expensive. The reason cruise missiles work is not because they are particularly brilliant, but because they are cheap enough to throw away. A cheap drone that can survive an average of one or two missions before being shot down is even cheaper. But to build a drone that can compete in the air to air arena would be so expensive that the drones would find themselves swarmed and defeated by Chinese in their license built Sukhois.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Great observations!! Political correctness has shut us down in spirit but we must reject PC and start speaking up about everything. Marxists aren’t even bothering with being subtle any more.

[af_vet_rr]

We've already got robot wars. We need to get better than everybody else faster than everybody else.

Exactly. We're within 20 years or so of being done with manned fighters, although men and women will still by doing a lot of the flying, just not from a cockpit.

I wish I could talk about some of the things I've seen and heard about, because what you currently see is nearly outdated.

[Nowhere Man]

If you think that man-rating a vehicle is expensive, then you haven't tried making one truly autonomous. Watch the Great Robot Race and Great Robot Race 2, they are out on YouTube. They were just trying to get an autonomous robot to drive through traffic. A simple task, yet the state of the art million dollar bots routinely drove into buildings, crashed into each other and freaked out at stop signs. And while I haven't experienced air to air combat I'm thinking it a bit more chaotic and fast paced than a drive to the corner grocery.

But making a drone autonomous, even when it becomes possible to do it, also makes them expensive. The reason cruise missiles work is not because they are particularly brilliant, but because they are cheap enough to throw away. A cheap drone that can survive an average of one or two missions before being shot down is even cheaper. But to build a drone that can compete in the air to air arena would be so expensive that the drones would find themselves swarmed and defeated by Chinese in their license built Sukhois.

I used to work in IT.

I remember the TV series on PBS, "Cosmos," where Carl Sagan was talking about the (then) proposed ideas of sending a rover to wander around on Mars. This was 1980 when they were testing protoypes. He made the point that since Mars can be as far as 20+ "light minutes" from Earth, the probes would need to be autonomous, need to "think for themselves." They need to think, "what if I approach a cliff, what do I do? How can I go around a huge rock and/or crater? Should I climb this hill?" and so on. You need to have some sort of AI, Artificial Intelligence programmed into the probes on what to do. Also it would have to take from experience and "think and learn." You will need the AI to be able to do that too.

Wandering around on a planet taking pictures, samples and on on is a huge feat and can be done and has been done but when you have to make an autonomous plane/tank/whatever to be able to go on offense/defense and whatnot, that would even take a much more powerful AI. In 1980, we were not certainly there, I don't think we are much closer now. You would need tons and tons of code that would need written, debugged an the ability to lean and modify itself. We face three limits, software, hardware and money. Even if we can conquer the first two, I think it would be so cost prohibitive that I would be afraid to use it, as you put it, our enemies could swarm the think with their Sukhoi's, MiG-21's or whatever and take the thing down. One of my favorite sites is TV Tropes and this tactic is known as a "Zerg Rush" and/or "death by a thousand cuts."

The plane pictured in this thread is neat looking, but not for long when you "Zerg Rush" it with a load of MiG-21's.

[PIF]

Why don’t they just use the anti-gravity and inertial damping systems recovered at Roswell?

—

That would be the TR-3B and variants. A vehicle which may or may not exist.

[PIF]

Norm's prediction just took a few more steps to becoming true with BHO’s downsizing the mil to 500K, which will be reduced to 250K if the mandated deficit spending kicks in.

By the end of BHO’s second or early in the beginning of his third term, the US mil should be on par with Canada's - around 10K personnel.

[PIF]

Sounds like ol’ Ben and company have been busy with James Clerk Maxwell’s original 200 field theorems ...

[hattend]

Looks kind of like the Northrop YF-23... 40 years later