Lockheed Martin didn’t win the bid for America’s next-generation fighter, but its CEO still wants to build a jet that’s in almost the same league.
At the company’s first-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, James Taiclet said he has set a new goal for his staff: To soup up the F-35 so it can match 80% of the F-47’s capabilities for half the cost.
“My challenge to my aeronautics team is, let’s get 80% of sixth-gen capability at half the price,” Taiclet said.
“And that’s something that — and these are engineers, they wouldn’t have agreed to this if they didn’t think there was a path to get there — that’s something we’re going to go out and do,” he added.
Taiclet called this “fifth-generation plus.” Lockheed’s plan to get there, he said, would leverage its experience from years of working to win the bid for the next-generation fighter.
The firm ultimately lost the bid for the sixth-generation stealth fighter to Boeing, which President Donald Trump announced in late March as the selected manufacturer. That decision rocked Lockheed’s reputation in the stealth fighter game, which it had dominated with the Nighthawk, F-22 Raptor, and F-35 Lightning II.
At Tuesday’s earnings call, Taiclet said Lockheed wants to move on from losing the award.
“We are not going to protest the NGAD decision of the US government,” he said, referring to Next-Generation Air Dominance, which is the US program to create the sixth-generation successor to the F-22. “We are moving forward and moving out on applying all the technologies that we developed for our NGAD bid onto our embedded base of F-35 and F-22.”
“It’s a little kind of — not uncomfortable — but novel for our industry to think that way,” Taiclet added. “But we are thinking that way.”
He compared his ambition to beefing up a road vehicle so much that it becomes a race car.
“So, the F-35. So we’re basically going to take the chassis and turn it into a Ferrari. It’s like a NASCAR upgrade, so to speak,” he said.
Taiclet said Lockheed had worked on developing better sensors and stealth techniques for its sixth-gen bid, and could apply those technologies to improve the F-35. He also mentioned a newer tracking system and longer-range weapons.
He told analysts that the idea is for advanced aircraft to avoid dogfights if they can. “We want to shoot the other guy, as I said, before he even knows we’re there,” he said.
Boeing’s F-47 is meant to be America’s most advanced stealth fighter yet, with plans for the aircraft to fly in tandem with semiautonomous “wingmen” drones. With air superiority as its priority, one of the next-generation fighter’s primary roles is to destroy enemy aircraft.
Meanwhile, the F-35, a multi-role fighter that entered service in 2015, is Lockheed’s headline export. Taiclet said the company expects to deliver between 170 and 190 F-35s in 2025, with a backlog of about 360 more aircraft.
Lockheed reported a net profit of $1.7 billion for the first quarter ending on March 30, up from $1.5 billion in the first quarter of 2024. Earnings of $7.28 per share beat Wall Street’s expectations of $6.34 per share.
The company’s stock price climbed 0.82% to $462.08 at market close on Tuesday.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin did not respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
