Is Trump’s ‘F-55’ fighter jet real?

“One of the things, for the people that are interested in the military, that I asked to look into—the F-35,” President Trump told an audience in Qatar on Thursday, launching into a minutes-long disquisition that left defense officials and aviation experts wondering just what he was talking about.

“We’re doing an upgrade, a simple upgrade, but we’re also doing an F-55. I’m going to call it an F-55, and that’s going to be a substantial upgrade, but it’s going to be also with two engines, because an F-35 has a single engine. I don’t like single engines,” the president said during a press conference in Doha, the second stop on the first international trip of his second presidential term. “Even this man [GE Aerospace CEO Larry Culp], he’s the best in the world at engines, but on occasion, I know you won’t admit this, if an engine goes out it’s nice to have two, three or four. That’s why I like the 747, it’s got four. Today they’re getting very big and, a little more cost saving to have two very, very big ones. No matter how good, you know, they tell me, Larry, the engine will never go out. Well, I think it goes out on occasion, fairly rarely. 

“We’re going to do an F-55 and I think, if we get the right price, we have to get the right price, and that will be two engines, and a super upgrade on the F-35 and then we’re going to do the F-22. I think the most beautiful fighter jet in the world is the F-22, but we’re going to do an F-22 Super, and it will be a very modern version of the F-22 fighter jet.” 

The terms “F-55” and “F-22 Super” do not appear to have been previously mentioned in public by U.S. officials. 

Asked about Trump’s words, the F-35 Joint Program Office and the Office of the Secretary of Defense deferred questions to the White House. The White House did not respond to questions in time for publication.

Defense experts and a former defense official said Trump might have been conflating existing programs such as the Air Force’s sixth-generation F-47, upgrades for the F-35, and possibly the Navy’s F/A-XX program.

“I think he’s confused. Very confused,” one former Air Force official said. “I can’t even imagine what it is like to try and brief him.” 

Trump appeared to indicate that the “F-55” would be a two-engine version of the F-35, but such a modification would require a comprehensive redesign of the airframe, essentially resulting in a new airplane. 

Trump’s comments come weeks after Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet said the company is working on an upgrade to “supercharge” the F-35 and deliver 80% of sixth-generation capability at half the price. But Lockheed is talking about better avionics and sensors, not a redesign to double the number of engines. How Trump’s proposed “F-55” coincides with Lockheed’s plans, if at all, remains to be seen. 

It is also possible that Trump is thinking about the two-engine F-47, a sixth-generation fighter jet that Boeing won the contract to build in March. 

Yet another possibility is that Trump was talking about the Navy’s F/A-XX, a different next-gen fighter jet intended to replace the F/A-18 Super Hornet. Boeing and Northrop Grumman are competing to win the F/A-XX design-and-build contract. But the program is in limbo: some Pentagon officials want to delay the contract award up to three years to use the money elsewhere, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

In his Thursday remarks, Trump also mentioned an “F-22 Super.” The Air Force is already modernizing some of its Raptor fleet, but it’s unclear whether the president was referring to that effort or something else entirely. There’s been no public mention of an upgrade beyond that.

On the topic of the F-22, Trump continued, “And I don’t know if you know it, but who copied it? China. They copied it. I said, I’m looking. They said, that’s the F-22. They copied our design but they’re not going to be able to copy our engines too quickly or anything else. So we’re going to be doing an F-22 Super. And this will be a plane like no—to me, it’s the most beautiful fighter plane ever made, and so I want to do that.”  

The president added, “Sometimes they do stealth. I'm not a huge believer in stealth because stealth is—basically a lot of it’s the design and the shape. But also if that’s the case, they’re going to figure it out pretty fast, I think. So you're going to design an ugly plane for stealth reasons and then six months later they’re going to figure this out and then you’re going to be stuck with an ugly plane.”

In a statement, Lockheed said, “We thank President Trump for his support of the F-35 and F-22 and will continue to work closely with the Administration to realize its vision for air dominance.”