- The Air Force recently announced it secretly designed, built, and flown a new fighter jet.
- The service has refused to release photos of the aircraft or comment on what it looks like.
- At the same time, many depictions of future aircraft made by the Air Force all look very similar.
Last week, the U.S. Air Force made the surprise announcement that it had secretly designed, built, and flown a brand-new fighter jet in just one year. The Air Force hasn’t said a word about what the mysterious sixth-generation fighter actually looks like—just that it was created under the Next Generation Air Dominance program.
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But according to one theory, the Air Force has possibly been serving depictions of the new jet for years. The Air Force has published several concept pictures of fighter jets, all of which have the same futuristic appearance.
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The Aviationist, a respected military aviation blog, has published a series of several images released by the U.S. Air Force over the years that may openly hint at what the new plane could look like. The service has released photos of a stealthy-looking, arrowhead-shaped craft. The aircraft, like the B-2A Spirit bomber, lacks vertical stabilizers, giving it a flat appearance.
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As The Aviationist documents, the same basic aircraft design is featured in an image celebrating the 73rd anniversary of the Air Force’s founding. Meanwhile, the Air Force Research Lab showed off a similar-looking plane, and the Air Force released another image just like it on Instagram. The same basic shape is also shown in a Northrop Grumman video released in 2016, seen below:
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Could all of these clues be part of the Air Force’s plan to show us the aircraft’s design before the plane itself became public?
The idea that a military service would drop hints like these right out in the open is akin to pop culture Easter eggs. That’s all fairly harmless. But there’s no good reason why the Air Force would do such a thing with a fighter jet, as it would give adversaries the opportunity to study the basic shape of the plane before it became operational.
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In the end, The Aviationist writes, “the 73rd [anniversary] graphics could have simply used a stylized, fictional aircraft that has nothing to do with the real thing; could be teasing an existing type; or could just be part of a deception operation. Who knows?”
The blog also notes the Air Force lifted some details from artist Rodrigo Avella, who had published his own take on what a futuristic fighter would look like.
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