Details of the first of two mostly secret initiatives to support the U.S. Air Force’s five-year-old pursuit of a sixth-generation successor to the Lockheed Martin F-22 are now released and reveal that a critical technology for the Next-Generation Air Dominance program could become flightworthy by mid-2025.

The schedule and spending details on the Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) appeared for the first time in the Air Force’s budget justification documents for fiscal 2021 that were submitted to Congress in February, but passed unnoticed for several months.

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