The US Navy still hasn’t picked a builder for the F/A-XX, its first clean-sheet carrier fighter jet design in a generation, and as of September 3, 2026, the wait has stretched past the deadline officials themselves set. Whichever company eventually wins, the jet it builds has to satisfy one non-negotiable number: a combat radius the Navy has described internally as roughly double what today’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet can manage, all while staying under an 85,000-lb (38,555 kg) maximum takeoff weight ceiling. That single, unforgiving aircraft design constraint, not stealth coatings, nor sensor fusion, is what has actually shaped this program from the inside.
The reason is that the map underneath the carrier fleet has changed. China’s anti-ship missile arsenal now reaches far enough out to sea that a Carrier Air Wing built around a roughly 500-nautical-mile fighter has to sail dangerously close to shore just to put a weapon on target. Doubling the F/A-XX’s reach makes the difference between a carrier strike group operating from international waters and one operating inside an adversary’s own weapons engagement zone.
The Decision The Navy Still Hasn’t Made
As documented by DefenseCoop, the F/A-XX competition has narrowed to two finalists, 
Boeing and Northrop Grumman, after Lockheed Martin exited the program roughly a year and a half ago. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle told reporters back in April that a builder would be selected in August 2026. That month has now come and gone with no announcement, prompting memes among defense watchers, leaving Boeing and Northrop Grumman in public limbo, and reviving comparisons to the Donald Trump administration’s competing priority on the United States Air Force’s F-47, according to Axios.
Asked this week for an update, a spokesperson for the Chief of Naval Operations told Axios there was no additional information to share on the program or its schedule. Aviation Week reported in late August that the Navy remained hopeful an award was still coming, but that the timing was effectively out of the service’s hands, language that points toward the delay sitting somewhere above the Navy itself, whether at the Pentagon or the White House budget office.
Boeing and Northrop Grumman, ranked the sixth and fourth-largest defense contractors in the world respectively, have said little publicly beyond expressing confidence in their own designs: both companies pointed Axios’ questions back to the Navy this week. Boeing’s head of Defense, Space and Security, Steve Parker, pushed back over the summer on the idea that the industrial base couldn’t handle building both the F-47 and the F/A-XX at once, telling reporters in London ahead of the Farnborough International Airshow 2026 that Boeing bid both programs knowing it would need to execute both, as reported by Axios. He added that Boeing was ready whenever the decision came, without offering a timeline of his own. Industrial capacity has shadowed this decision throughout 2025 and 2026. As Simple Flying reported, Boeing beat Lockheed Martin to the US Air Force’s sixth-generation F-47 contract in 2025, mainly on the strength of a fully modeled digital twin that let the service assess maintainability before a prototype ever flew. Whichever logo eventually ends up on the airframe, the identity of the winning contractor is almost beside the point next to the number both companies have spent years designing against.
The Number Driving Everything: Combat Radius
Let’s start with what the Super Hornet can actually do. NAVAIR’s own published figures list the F/A-18 E/F’s maximum combat range at 1,275 nautical miles (2,346 km), but that number assumes a nearly clean configuration, carrying just two AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. Loaded for a realistic strike mission, naval aviators have long put the Super Hornet’s practical combat radius closer to 400 to 500 nautical miles (740 to 926 km), range for several representative combat configurations.
That gap between headline range and operational reach is one reason the Navy has spent years trying to improve the range with drop tanks, conformal fuel tanks, and now the Boeing MQ-25 Stingray unmanned air tanker.
19FortyFive has put the target at a 125% increase over the Super Hornet, transiting to somewhere between 1,250 and 1,700 nautical miles (2,315 to 3,148 km). Other reporting is more conservative: Simple Flying has cited estimates closer to 750 to 1,250 nautical miles ( 1,389 to 2,315 km) based on statements from the Navy’s air warfare division. There is no agreement on the exact figures since the Navy hasn’t published any. The estimates come from a very specific, unwelcome development in the Western Pacific.
Why China’s Missiles, Not Rival Fighter Jets, Set The Requirement
The primary driver behind F/A-XX’s range requirement is survivability against China’s anti-access/area denial network, as highlighted by 19FortyFive. The centerpiece of that network is the DF-26, an intermediate-range ballistic missile Beijing has openly nicknamed the “carrier killer”, with a reported maximum range of up to 2,160 nautical miles (4,000 km), as reported by MissileThreat, and the DF-21D reaches out to around 864 nautical miles (1,600 km). Together, the two missiles push the safe standoff distance for a carrier strike group out well beyond where naval air wings have historically operated.
That’s also why the Super Hornet’s limitations become problematic. We have previously argued that the Super Hornet remains the backbone of the Carrier Air Wing even in 2026, still accounting for the majority of deployed strike fighters, despite the F-35C’s arrival. The strategic math in one line: if a carrier has to stay outside a 1,200-nautical-mile (2,222 km) buffer zone, and its strike fighters can only reach 500 nautical miles unrefueled, the Air Wing simply can’t touch the targets that it is meant to hit.
It’s worth noting that range alone wouldn’t make the F/A-XX survivable on its own. Stealth design and networked sensors can improve the survivability of an aircraft, but none of them matters if the jet can’t physically reach the fight. The other half of the equation is a weight limit that fights against every extra gallon of fuel the Navy wants to add.
Why 85,000 lb Is A Hard Ceiling, Not A Target
F/A-XX maximum takeoff weight is capped at 85,000 lb (38,555 kg), a limit set to keep the jet compatible with existing aircraft carrier deck operations. Carrier catapults, aircraft elevators, and hangar bay dimensions were engineered around the aircraft the fleet already operates, much of that infrastructure dating back to the original Nimitz-class design of the late 1960s. Steam catapults on today’s carriers are generally rated to launch aircraft in the 10,000-80,000 lb (4,535-36,287 kg) range, putting F/A-XX’s weight ceiling right at the edge of what legacy naval equipment can comfortably handle.
That ceiling puts real pressure on the range requirement, because more fuel, required for more distance, means more weight. Our rankings of the US Navy’s supercarriers by aircraft capacity illustrate how tightly deck space, elevator size, and hangar volume are already allocated across a Carrier Air Wing.
While, according to InsideDefense, the F/A-XX program carried $1.7 billion in FY2026 appropriations and a $140 million request for FY2027, none of that spending is guaranteed, and the last budget request suggests the fight over its money isn’t over.
A Program Congress Rescued Once, And Now A Shrinking Budget Request
The Pentagon’s initial budget request for F/A-XX in fiscal year 2026 was just $74 million, as documented by TheAviationist, a signal the program was being quietly deprioritized in favor of the United States Air Force’s F-47. Congress didn’t accept that framing. DefenseOne illustrated that lawmakers added $897.3 million to the program.
The picture darkened again heading into FY2027: according to Axios, the White House’s $1.5 trillion budget blueprint for FY2027 included just $140 million for F/A-XX, a fraction of what Congress ultimately provided the year before. Admiral Caudle had described the selection process as deliberately unhurried, telling reporters at the Sea-Air-Space 2026 conference back in the spring that one contractor in the running “really can’t deliver the timeframe we need it”, without naming which one.
Months later, with no contract announced and the CNO’s office declining to explain the delay, that unhurried frame looks more like an open question about which company, or which budget, actually determines when this program will move forward. The stakes are sharpened by China fielding two sixth-generation prototypes, the J-36 and J-50, since late 2024. Whatever the funding drama and the missed deadline say about Washington, they don’t change the engineering problem both finalists have been chasing for years.
Why This Decision Is Really About Range, Not Rivalry
Strip away the Boeing-versus-Northrop framing, and F/A-XX is really a story about geography catching up with naval aviation. The Navy didn’t ask for a jet that flies twice as far as the Super Hornet because pilots wanted more legroom or because a rival contractor forced the issue. That number is needed because the range of Chinese missiles grew faster than the Carrier Air Wing’s, and closing that gap turned out to require an aircraft built around fuel efficiency and range from its very first design sketch, with weight as the one constraint that couldn’t be negotiable.
So whenever a name finally does get announced, the more interesting fact won’t be who won, but that the aircraft’s entire shape, from its internal fuel volume down to the last few hundred pounds of its weight budget, was decided years ago by how far out a Chinese missile can reach, and how far inside that ring a carrier can still safely operate.
That’s also why F/A-XX has proven so hard to cancel, delay, or quietly fold into the Air Force’s program outright, despite a year of Pentagon hesitation, a budget request that briefly suggested otherwise, and now a slipped decision date. A Carrier Air Wing that can’t outrange the threat is a fleet the Navy can no longer safely sail toward a fight in the Western Pacific. Congress’ $897.3 million intervention in FY2026 was a vote about the range problem that couldn’t wait any longer rather than a vote of confidence in Boeing or Northrop Grumman specifically. The open question, nearly a year later, is whether the rest of Washington still agrees.
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