Summary and Key Points: The selection of Boeing to develop the USAF’s 6th-generation NGAD fighter, the F-47, has sparked debate, particularly about its apparent inclusion of canard foreplanes.
-While canards enhance maneuverability, they typically increase radar signature, contradicting U.S. stealth principles as seen in the F-22 and F-35 designs.
-Some analysts suspect these public renderings might deliberately obscure the aircraft’s true design, serving as an “artist’s deception.”
-Questions linger over whether advanced stealth coatings could mitigate the canards’ radar reflectivity or if the canards shown in official images are simply misdirection, masking the true stealth-focused configuration.
-The actual design remains subject to speculation.
The F-47 Canard Question
The March 21 announcement that Boeing would be the prime contractor to develop the US Air Force’s (USAF) 6th-generation fighter aircraft to replace the Lockheed Martin F-22A has raised numerous questions in the combat aircraft design community.
Some analysts view the decision itself, and the small number of clues about the aircraft’s configuration raises as many or more questions than then answered.
One of the best aircraft illustrators and photo interpreters I ever knew from inside the US aerospace industry had a clever label for the paintings and drawings of secret aircraft project concepts put together by people like himself. Those illustrations are usually released well before any actual photos of these so-called “black” programs are made public.
Their function is ostensibly to give an inkling of what an aircraft looks like and why—and to present it to a broader distribution of persons beyond those cleared to know the details of the program. But, as my one-time colleague always used to say, putting these works of aircraft artists such as himself out there for all to see was not really designed to provide insight into the actual design of the aircraft in question. The intent was quite the opposite.
“We have a name for those kinds of illustrated images,” he said. “We call them an ‘artist’s deception.'”
One has to ask if something of that degree of deception is at work today.
Is There a Good Reason For Those Canards
Among the many inquiries in the past days is why the official images released for the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) design show what appears to be a pair of moveable canard foreplanes on the aircraft. Canards in and of themselves are neither unusual nor mysterious in their inclusion in an aircraft design. Many fighter aircraft in service today utilize canards as part of their configuration, offering numerous benefits for aerodynamic performance.
However, including a canard in the F-47 design runs against the US traditions in designing stealthy aircraft. It is the opposite of the practice of the proceeding, 5th-generation aircraft like F-22A and the F-35 variants in which canards are purposely excluded.
While augmenting an aircraft’s performance, they offer that benefit—some stealth designers say—at the expense of a low radar cross section (RCS).
Next-generation fighters, such as the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) Chengdu J-20, have seen their designs ridiculed by some.
In the case of J-20, this is on the grounds that its sizeable canard violates the laws of basic low-RCS design, specifically, that any horizontal control surface has to be in proper alignment with the rest of the aircraft’s platform.
Alignment Matters
By way of example, several analysts on the science of stealth design say, “On the F-22, F-35, Su-57, and J-31, the horizontal stabilizer is hidden by the main wing and parallel to the main wing too, so it keeps the planform alignment—thus helping stealth.
“J-20’s canard is an extra reflecting surface from a frontal view by not being hidden by the main wing, it is neither parallel with the wing or the vertical stabilizer, therefore it is breaking planform alignment … F-22 has thrust vectoring for trimming during cruise flight. J-20 has no thrust vectoring—forcing [use of] the canard to deflect more during cruise flight. Thus, J-20 is not as stealthy as F-22 or even X-36.”
No one outside of the program knows for certain just how accurate the released illustrations of the F-47 are of the aircraft’s final design. After all, the purpose of the Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) is to spend some $20 billion to develop an aircraft that meets all of the requirements of the platform—including stealth capability.
Stealth, as another article explains, is composed of two elements. One is the shaping of the aircraft so that there are no radar-reflecting surfaces, a rule that the inclusion of these canards would seem to run counter to.
The other is the ability of the material that the aircraft surface is composed of to absorb enough of a radar signal so that there is not enough of a return of that signal.
Whether the latter technology can overpower the laws of physics that govern the former—or whether what we have seen is another “artist’s deception”—is the question we are all waiting for the answer to.
About the Author:
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
