The US Navy has picked Boeing to build its next carrier fighter. On Tuesday 29 September 2026, the Pentagon announced that Boeing had won the F/A-XX competition against Northrop Grumman, with a full-scale development contract valued at more than $20 billion. The aircraft will replace the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the EA-18G Growler from the 2030s.

It is the end of a competition that ran for years, survived an attempt to shelve it, and missed its own August deadline. It also leaves one company in charge of both of America’s crewed sixth-generation fighters: Boeing already builds the Air Force’s F-47. Here is what was decided, what it means for the carrier air wing, and why the hardest part starts now.

What the Pentagon announced

The award was announced by the Pentagon, not by the Navy alone, a sign of how high the decision had travelled. The contract covers the full-scale development phase and, in the Pentagon’s wording, “procures multiple test aircraft for ground, airworthiness, systems, and weapons integration testing.” It does not cover series production, and the Navy has still not said how many F/A-XX fighters it intends to buy.

Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao called it “a new era for the U.S. Navy” and described the sixth-generation fighter as “a generational leap in air superiority.” On the same day the Navy also gave Boeing a small contract, reported at about $16.7 million, to support the orderly shutdown of the Super Hornet and Growler production lines in St. Louis. One Boeing Navy fighter line is closing as the next one opens.

Why the carrier air wing needs it

The case for F/A-XX comes down to one word: range. Over the past two decades the reach of the carrier air wing has shrunk, as long-range aircraft like the A-6 Intruder, the S-3 Viking and the F-14 Tomcat left service and were replaced by shorter-legged Hornets and Super Hornets. At the same time, China has fielded anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles designed to keep American carriers far from its coast.

The Navy’s answer is a fighter that can strike from further out. Its early requirement documents called for about 25 percent more range than today’s strike fighters. Naval analyst Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute told USNI News that range was the single most important characteristic, and the hardest to achieve on a carrier deck. The Air Force’s F-47 gets its range, as he put it, by simply being a bigger aircraft with more fuel. A carrier fighter has to fit on elevators, hangar decks and catapults, so it has to find its range through efficiency instead.

The role has shifted too. Over the years the Navy moved from imagining F/A-XX as a long-range “missile truck” towards a stealthy penetrating fighter that directs armed drones. In April 2026 Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle tied it directly to the Navy’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft effort, for which General Atomics, Boeing, Anduril and Northrop Grumman all hold contracts. The F/A-XX will fly alongside the F-35C, not replace it, and will be refuelled by Boeing’s MQ-25 Stingray, the unmanned carrier tanker that has itself suffered production delays.

Eighteen years to a decision

The F/A-XX requirement dates back to June 2008. The Navy issued a formal request for information in April 2012, studied options that ranged from buying more F-35Cs to building a new aircraft, and in 2016 briefly dropped the F/A-XX name in favour of a broader “family of systems” approach to replacing the Super Hornet and Growler. An analysis of alternatives finished in 2019, and for years much of the funding sat inside a classified special access programme.

To save time and money, the Navy chose to power the aircraft with derivative turbofans rather than the more ambitious adaptive-cycle engines the Air Force is developing for the F-47. In March 2025 Lockheed Martin was eliminated, leaving Boeing and Northrop Grumman.

Then the programme nearly stopped. In June 2025 the Pentagon’s fiscal 2026 budget request included only about $74 million for F/A-XX, enough to keep the design alive but not to award a contract. A senior defence official explained that the department had decided to go “all-in” on the F-47, because it believed the industrial base could only handle going fast on one programme at a time. Congress disagreed. The final fiscal 2026 spending bill restored the money; Pentagon budget documents cited by USNI News put the programme’s fiscal 2026 funding at $1.7 billion.

The Navy then promised a decision in August 2026. August came and went, as we reported in F/A-XX Decision Slips, with officials saying the timing was out of the service’s hands. The award finally came at the end of September.

Why Boeing won

Neither the Navy nor the Pentagon has published its evaluation, and the designs remain classified. But the Navy’s senior officer had already signalled what mattered most.

Boeing had spent years preparing for exactly this argument. It has been building a large new secure factory for advanced combat aircraft in St. Louis, investing in digital engineering, and it has built every Hornet and Super Hornet the Navy has flown since the McDonnell Douglas merger. Its defence chief made the point directly.

Northrop Grumman, by contrast, carries two of the largest programmes in the Pentagon, the B-21 Raider bomber and the Sentinel ICBM. It was trying to return as prime contractor on a Navy fighter for the first time since the F-14 Tomcat, the legendary Grumman design. Analysts told Breaking Defense that losing F/A-XX is a blow but not a threat to the company, and Northrop may yet look at a protest, although protests against major classified aircraft awards have rarely succeeded.

One company, two sixth-generation fighters

For Boeing’s defence business the turnaround is remarkable. A few years ago it faced the prospect of its fighter lines closing, and it was absorbing heavy losses on fixed-price programmes such as the KC-46 tanker and the T-7 trainer. Now it holds the future of American crewed fighters for both services. Richard Aboulafia of AeroDynamic Advisory called it an extraordinary turnaround, from a legacy manufacturer of sunsetting fighter programmes to the company with a lock on the US fighter future.

That concentration is also the main risk. The same St. Louis complex will have to develop the F-47 and the F/A-XX, build the T-7A Red Hawk, and raise F-15EX production, all at once. Former Congressional Research Service analyst Jeremiah Gertler asked the obvious question: does Boeing have, and can it find, the people to keep all of those lines running at a high rate at the same time? The Air Force’s senior acquisition adviser, Gen. Dale White, raised the same concern about the industrial base more broadly this month, as we covered in F-47 and F/A-XX: The Industrial Base Problem Nobody Solved.

There is an upside to the same fact. If the two aircraft share technology, and some analysts expect they will, Gertler suggested that an F/A-XX could fly sooner than a clean-sheet design normally would. The Air Force expects the F-47 to fly in 2028.

Que se passe-t-il ensuite ?

Much of what matters is still unknown. The Navy has not said how many F/A-XX fighters it plans to buy, what a production aircraft will cost, when the first one will fly, or which engines it will use. Investors will be watching the contract structure closely, since fixed-price development deals have cost Boeing billions before. Any protest by Northrop Grumman would pause work for months.

What is clear is the shape of the Navy’s future air wing: a crewed sixth-generation fighter at its centre, F-35Cs alongside, MQ-25 tankers and armed drones around them. After eighteen years of studies, a near-cancellation and a missed deadline, the Navy has finally chosen who will build the centrepiece. Delivering it before the Super Hornets wear out is the next test, and it belongs to Boeing.

Sources: US Department of Defense contract announcement, 29 September 2026; Boeing press release, “U.S. Navy Selects Boeing for F/A-XX Program” (29 September 2026); USNI News; Breaking Defense; The War Zone; Air & Space Forces Magazine; Defense News; DefenseScoop (June 2025 budget request); Wikipedia, “F/A-XX program”.