Sixth-generation fighters are the next wave of combat aircraft under development by major military powers. They share a common design philosophy: they are significantly larger than their predecessors, optimised for range, stealth and payload over dogfighting agility.
Fighter jets are categorised by generation. Many NATO planes in service today, such as America's F-16, are fourth-generation aircraft built from the 1970s to the 1990s. Fifth-generation planes—the F-35 and F-22—feature stealth, sustained supersonic flight and advanced computer systems. Several factors are driving sixth-generation designs larger:
Donald Trump announced in March 2025 that Boeing would build America's next fighter, the F-47, under a contract worth over $20bn. Development had stalled under Biden because each jet was expected to cost $160m-180m—twice as much as the F-35—limiting the fleet to around 200 planes. Current plans call for each F-47 to operate with two CCAs; ground-testing of CCA prototypes began in May 2025.
In December 2024 China showed off what was believed to be a prototype of the J-36, a large plane with stealthy features and a flying-wing design. Aviation expert Bill Sweetman compared it to an "airborne cruiser", optimised for range, stealth and carrying capacity.
The Tempest, co-developed by BAE Systems, Leonardo and Mitsubishi, is due to enter service in 2035. It is designed to cross the Atlantic on a single tank of fuel—a journey that would require today's Typhoon to refuel three or four times. It will carry roughly double the payload of the largest F-35 variant. Leonardo's chief executive, Roberto Cingolani, describes sixth-generation planes as "flying supercomputers"; the Tempest will be able to absorb a medium-sized city's worth of data per second.
The Future Combat Air System, conceived in 2017 by Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, is developed jointly by France, Germany and Spain. It comprises a "sixth-generation" fighter jet (the New Generation Fighter, or NGF), a swarm of autonomous drones and a "combat cloud" communications system, intended to be ready by 2040.
Dassault, the French aerospace company, leads the construction of the NGF. Its outspoken chief executive, Eric Trappier, objects to the project's governance structure, in which Airbus—representing both Germany and Spain—has equal weight: "I will not accept three people sitting around a table deciding on all the technical aspects required to fly a high-performance aircraft." Airbus does not want to find itself in a subordinate role.
France needs a new jet by 2040 to replace the Rafale fighters that carry part of its nuclear deterrent. Germany's participation in NATO "nuclear sharing" means it also needs nuclear-capable jets, but the Luftwaffe's growing fleet of American F-35s makes the deadline less urgent. A Franco-German cabinet meeting in August 2025 was supposed to put FCAS back on track, but the mood only deteriorated. Friedrich Merz, Germany's chancellor, sighed: "We are not making any progress with this project."
A collapse would be a devastating blow to Franco-German relations and to the "strategic autonomy" Mr Macron has long sought.
By February 2026 the project was widely described as near collapse. What is killing FCAS is dysfunctional collaboration: Dassault refuses to surrender intellectual property to Airbus, and other French firms behave similarly. Germany is ready to walk; the only thing keeping FCAS alive is that neither Mr Macron nor Mr Merz can work out how to cancel it while saving face. The "combat cloud" may be the only part that survives.
With Germany nearly doubling its defence budget, Airbus could go it alone—it wants a heavier fighter than Dassault's carrier-capable design—and might partner with Sweden's Saab. Europe could end up with four different sixth-generation fighters.
FCAS fits a pattern: France pulled out of a €7bn drone programme with Airbus, Dassault and Leonardo in late 2025; a Franco-German tank is years behind schedule; a joint marine patrol aircraft fell apart in 2021. Sebastian Laiseca Segura, a former FCAS director at Indra (the consortium's Spanish partner), says three other joint projects over five years are essentially write-offs.
Two other joint European projects are in better shape than FCAS. The European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA), launched in 2024, is developing ballistic and cruise missiles with seven partners: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and Britain. It is a loose coalition encouraging programmes between two or three partners at a time: France, Italy and Britain are developing a stealthy cruise missile, while Germany is building a more powerful version of its Taurus missile with Sweden.
The European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI), begun in 2022, is a German-led procurement scheme for air-defence systems which over 20 countries have joined. It sources off-the-shelf kit: European systems for short and medium-range roles; American Patriot and Israeli Arrow interceptors for long-range capabilities. France has not joined, saying Europe should not rely on American systems.
Camille Grand of ASD, Europe's aerospace, security and defence trade organisation, notes that rapidly growing defence budgets in some countries may counterintuitively reduce the pressure for collaboration: "They can weigh the benefits of a national strategy against the complexity of co-operation."
The prevailing concept is that sixth-generation fighters will serve as the core of a "combat air system" in which a human pilot controls a fleet of uncrewed drones, known in American parlance as collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) and as autonomous collaborative platforms (ACPs) in Britain. The drones may scout ahead, identify targets or carry weapons, all under the pilot's control. Current F-35Bs can fly less than 1,000km from their carrier before having to return; loyal wingmen could push several hundred miles deeper into dangerous airspace. Most air forces believe artificial intelligence is not yet mature enough to replace a human pilot entirely; Britain's Royal Navy chief, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, is more bullish, arguing "this is all achievable much sooner than we might think." The RAF estimates full autonomy will arrive by 2040.
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