South Korea has barely finished building its first home-grown fighter, and it is already reaching for the next one — and this time it wants to skip a generation. Seoul has formally launched the concept study for a sixth-generation stealth fighter: tailless, deeply stealthy across multiple radar bands, powered by shape-shifting engines, and flying at the head of a swarm of drones.

It is an audacious leap for a country that only joined the modern-fighter club a few years ago with the KF-21 Boramae. But the pieces are moving fast, and the ambition is unmistakable: to stand alongside the United States, Europe and China in the race for the fighters of the 2040s.

From the KF-21 to something far bigger

South Korea is not throwing away the KF-21. Instead, the plan is to keep maturing it — from today's 4.5-generation jet into a genuine fifth-generation fighter with full stealth, and to harvest that technology for a clean-sheet sixth-generation aircraft to follow. The country's Agency for Defense Development has already shown its hand, unveiling an in-house sixth-generation design at an aerospace conference in Daejeon in July.

The formal step came on 21 August, when the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) opened a roughly 14-month concept study, inviting industry to propose configurations by 1 October. The budget for the study is modest — this is the drawing-board phase — but the requirements are anything but.

Where South Korea sits in the global 6th-generation fighter race.

What a Korean 6th-gen jet would be

The specification reads like a wish list for the 2040s. DAPA has floated two competing stealth configurations, including a tailless shape with novel control surfaces — the same radical direction the American F-47 and Europe's GCAP and FCAS are taking. It wants broadband stealth that hides the aircraft across the L, S and X radar bands, not just the narrow slice that today's stealth jets defeat.

It also wants two adaptive-cycle engines — power plants that can change their own airflow to be efficient in cruise and brutal in a fight — capable of sustained supersonic cruising. And, crucially, it is being designed from the start around artificial intelligence and manned-unmanned teaming: a single-seat fighter acting as the quarterback for a formation of loyal-wingman drones.

A tall order — and a statement of intent

None of this is guaranteed. A concept study is the very start of a road that has humbled far more experienced fighter nations, and the engine question in particular looms over the whole effort. Building a sixth-generation adaptive-cycle engine at home is arguably harder than building the jet around it.

But the direction of travel is clear. Having proven with the KF-21 that it can design and fly a modern fighter, South Korea is now betting it can leapfrog straight into the most exclusive club in aviation. Whether or not the timeline holds, the message to Washington, Beijing and Europe is that Seoul intends to be there when the sixth generation arrives.

Why the KF-21 changed the game for Korean air power.

Sources: aeroTELEGRAPH; The Aviationist; Janes; Aviation Week; Global Defense Corp; DAPA.