BOEING WINS THE NAVY’S F/A-XX — SO WHAT IS LOCKHEED WORKING ON?
Boeing has been selected to build the U.S. Navy’s next-generation F/A-XX carrier fighter, in a development contract estimated at more than $20 billion.
According to USNI News, the contract covers full-scale development and multiple test aircraft for ground, airworthiness, systems and weapons-integration testing. The new fighter is expected to begin entering the fleet as the first F/A-18E/F Super Hornets retire during the 2030s.
But the important part isn’t simply who won the contract.
It’s what the Navy expects this airplane to do.
One of the biggest problems facing the modern carrier air wing is range.
For decades, the effective striking distance of carrier aircraft has steadily decreased just as potential adversaries—particularly China—have invested heavily in long-range anti-ship missiles and other weapons designed specifically to keep American carriers farther from the fight.
It creates a pretty basic problem: If your airplanes can’t reach the target without bringing the carrier inside the enemy’s weapons envelope, eventually the carrier itself becomes less useful.
F/A-XX is intended to help solve that problem.
The Navy has revealed remarkably little about the actual aircraft, but USNI reports that the concept has evolved from what was once envisioned largely as a heavily armed “missile truck” into a stealthy penetrator capable of operating deep inside contested airspace while commanding groups of armed unmanned aircraft.
In other words, don’t think of F/A-XX as simply Super Hornet 2.0.
Think of it as the quarterback for an entire airborne combat network.
The Navy is simultaneously developing "Collaborative Combat Aircraft—CCAs—unmanned aircraft" designed to work alongside crewed fighters. General Atomics, Boeing, Anduril and Northrop Grumman are already involved in the Navy’s CCA effort, while Lockheed Martin is developing a ground-control system. The Navy has also acknowledged that artificial intelligence will play a role in how those aircraft are controlled and tasked.
Add the MQ-25 Stingray unmanned tanker, long-range weapons and off-board sensors, and the carrier air wing of the 2030s may look considerably different from the one we know today.
There is another major part of this announcement:
Boeing now has both of America’s publicly known next-generation fighter programs.
Boeing already won the Air Force’s F-47 program.
Now it has F/A-XX.
That represents a remarkable turnaround for a company that only a few years ago appeared to be losing ground in the tactical fighter business.
It also leaves one enormous name conspicuously absent:
Lockheed Martin.
The company that produced the F-117, F-22, and F-35 did not win either of these programs, and that makes me wonder about something else.
WHAT IS LOCKHEED WORKING ON?
The Pentagon has historically had good reason to maintain multiple capable aerospace contractors rather than allowing one company to dominate every advanced aircraft program.
Boeing now has two extraordinarily demanding fighter-development efforts underway at essentially the same time.
Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works certainly hasn’t closed its doors.
Quite the opposite.
Lockheed continues to openly work in stealth, autonomy, high-speed flight and hypersonics. Its own Skunk Works website even has a section titled:
“THINGS WE CAN’T TALK ABOUT.”
Underneath it is perhaps the most appropriate description possible:
“Some of our most important work isn’t in the headlines—by design.”
Which brings us to something very interesting happening at Edwards.
WHY IS NASA BRINGING AN SR-71 BACK?
For years, SR-71A tail number 844 sat quietly at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center.
Then it disappeared.
At first, NASA wasn’t saying much.
Now Aviation Week reports that NASA has actually contacted former SR-71 personnel about helping return the airplane to flight after nearly 27 years. The aircraft last flew in 1999.
That is not a trivial undertaking.
You don’t simply put fuel in a Blackbird, charge the battery and turn the key.
Restarting an SR-71 after nearly three decades means dealing with engines, seals, hydraulics, tires, specialized fuel systems, support equipment, maintenance procedures and institutional knowledge belonging to an airplane designed in the 1950s.
So the obvious question is:
Why?
What do you need an SR-71 for in 2026?
There are plenty of modern supersonic aircraft available for conventional flight research.
But there are very few airplanes capable of carrying experimental hardware at sustained Mach 3 speeds and around 80,000 feet.
That is where things get interesting.
NASA 844 has done exactly that before.
The aircraft was previously used as a high-speed flying laboratory. NASA flew it in aerodynamic, thermal, propulsion and sonic-boom research, and it once carried the **Linear Aerospike SR-71 Experiment—LASRE—**on its back.
That experiment involved NASA, Rocketdyne and, interestingly enough, Lockheed Martin.
So perhaps the right question isn’t simply:
Why reactivate an SR-71?
Maybe it is:
What needs to be tested at Mach 3?
An engine?
An inlet?
New high-temperature materials?
A thermal-protection system?
Sensors?
A propulsion component?
Or perhaps hardware associated with an aircraft that hasn’t been publicly revealed?
ENTER LOCKHEED
There is absolutely no public evidence at this point connecting NASA’s SR-71 effort to a secret Lockheed aircraft.
That distinction is important.
But the circumstances certainly make the aviation geek in me curious.
Lockheed is heavily involved in hypersonics right now.
Earlier this year, Lockheed Martin and GE Aerospace announced successful testing of a rotating-detonation ramjet intended for hypersonic applications. Lockheed has also unveiled a new hypersonic glide-body effort and, just this month, published an article emphasizing that the real technological frontier is no longer merely reaching hypersonic velocity—but achieving sustained, maneuverable flight inside the atmosphere.
That last part catches my attention.
Because sustained high-speed atmospheric flight is precisely the environment in which an SR-71 becomes useful as a research platform. Remember who built the SR-71 in the first place?
Lockheed Skunk Works.
For years we have also heard about the proposed SR-72, a Lockheed concept for an aircraft capable of hypersonic flight.
Whether anything resembling that aircraft actually exists is another matter entirely.
But losing F-47 and F/A-XX doesn’t necessarily mean Lockheed has lost the next generation of military aviation.
Maybe they’re simply playing a different game. Could there be a classified penetrating ISR platform? An unmanned high-speed reconnaissance aircraft? A hypersonic vehicle? Something descended from the SR-72 concept?
Or something completely different? Again, we simply don’t know.
But if NASA really is spending the money and effort required to put an SR-71 back into the air after nearly three decades, somebody apparently believes there is still a need for a Mach 3 flying laboratory, and laboratories usually exist because somebody has something they want to test.
So while everybody is understandably watching Boeing and its two shiny new sixth-generation fighter programs, I’ll also be keeping an eye on that old black airplane sitting out at Edwards.
Because in the black-aircraft world, sometimes the most interesting question isn’t:
What contract did somebody lose?
It’s: What contract haven’t we heard about yet?