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Will THIS follow the F-47? What the incredible seventh-generation AF-72 fighter will be like.

September 11, 2026

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No one has seriously moved on to seventh-generation combat aircraft yet. And that is perfectly understandable: even the final shape of the sixth generation has yet to emerge, while the rapid development of unmanned aviation has raised a much more fundamental question — how long will a human pilot actually remain inside a combat aircraft? In a few decades, most combat sorties may be flown by unmanned aircraft, while manned fighters could evolve into airborne command centers controlling entire formations of autonomous machines.

At the same time, sixth-generation aviation is no longer purely a designer’s fantasy. The American NGAD program has already reached the stage of flying experimental aircraft: the U.S. Air Force has officially stated that X-planes associated with the future F-47 have accumulated hundreds of flight hours over several years. In March 2025, Boeing was awarded the contract to develop the F-47 itself. The Air Force expects the aircraft to offer significantly greater range and more advanced stealth than current fifth-generation fighters. However, describing such an aircraft as literally “invisible to radar” would still be incorrect: absolute radar invisibility simply does not exist.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan are continuing work on the GCAP program, with the goal of fielding their next-generation combat aircraft around 2035. In other words, we can already make a reasonably good estimate of the main technological directions that will define sixth-generation fighters.

But what comes after that? What might a seventh-generation fighter look like, assuming manned combat aviation survives long enough to see one?

Our Western colleague RanmiT11 attempted to answer that question with an unusual concept called the AF-72. This is not a Boeing, Lockheed Martin, or any other aerospace company’s project. It is an artistic and technical vision of a possible future fighter. And that is precisely what makes it interesting: its creator tried to combine almost everything we might expect from a combat aircraft of the distant future.

From the F-47 to the AF-72 — What Would Actually Have to Change?

To imagine the seventh generation, we first need to understand what is expected to become standard on sixth-generation aircraft.

In the case of the American F-47, we are not simply talking about a new fighter. The U.S. Air Force sees it as one element of a much larger combat ecosystem incorporating a manned aircraft, Collaborative Combat Aircraft, reconnaissance assets, networked information-sharing systems, and long-range weapons.

American CCAs are already being developed as semi-autonomous aircraft capable of operating alongside manned fighters, extending the range, situational awareness, firepower, and survivability of the entire formation.

A seventh-generation fighter would therefore have to offer something more. Simply reducing radar signature would no longer be enough. Such an aircraft would most likely need to operate equally effectively with a pilot aboard or completely unmanned, independently make a substantial portion of tactical decisions, control numerous drones, and at the same time remain an extremely difficult target for radar, infrared, and passive detection systems.

This is the context in which the AF-72 becomes particularly interesting.

A Flying Wing Turned Into a Fighter

The first thing that stands out in the AF-72 images is its unusual proportions. The aircraft is extremely broad and flattened, almost as if someone had transformed a flying wing into a tactical fighter.

Commenters discussing the concept even compared it to a manta ray, while others immediately pointed out the enormous potential internal volume offered by such an airframe.

And that is not necessarily a disadvantage.

If future fighters really are expected to operate over enormous distances, particularly across the Pacific, internal volume will become extremely valuable. External fuel tanks compromise stealth. The same applies to externally carried missiles. Everything has to be hidden inside the airframe.

This creates an interesting paradox: the fighter of the future may be significantly larger than familiar aircraft such as the F-16, Rafale, or MiG-29.

A large aircraft does not automatically mean a large radar cross-section if its surfaces and geometry are properly designed. Meanwhile, the additional internal volume can accommodate fuel, weapons, powerful electronics, cooling systems, and electrical-generation equipment.

That is why the AF-72’s unusually broad configuration may look futuristic, but the basic concept of a large, long-range fighter is far from unrealistic. The U.S. Air Force has already emphasized significantly increased range as one of the key characteristics of the F-47 compared with today’s fighters.

Stealth Taken to the Next Level

Judging by the overall architecture of the AF-72, its creator appears to have aimed for something approaching all-aspect stealth. Conventional vertical tail surfaces are largely absent, while the fuselage and wing visually merge into a single lifting body.

This could indeed become an important feature of future combat aircraft.

Vertical stabilizers are extremely useful from an aerodynamic and control standpoint, but they can also produce strong radar reflections. Eliminating them places much greater demands on flight-control systems, but it also provides designers with more opportunities to manage an aircraft’s radar signature.

However, this is also where the AF-72 encounters one of its biggest engineering problems.

Commenters on Reddit quickly drew attention to the air intakes and the possibility that radar energy could obtain a relatively direct view of the engine compressor faces. Compressor blades are highly undesirable radar reflectors, which is why modern stealth aircraft use carefully shaped intake ducts and other techniques to shield their engines.

RanmiT11 himself acknowledged that combining the required stealth characteristics with the chosen configuration was difficult when designing the model.

So in its current form, it would be an exaggeration to describe the AF-72 as “completely invisible.” But for an artistic concept, this weakness is actually useful because it demonstrates just how difficult it would be to combine all the desired characteristics of a next-generation fighter in a single airframe.

And Now the Most Interesting Part — Vertical Takeoff

Perhaps the most unusual feature of the AF-72 is the attempt to combine the characteristics of a long-range stealth fighter with vertical takeoff and landing.

At first glance, that may seem unnecessary. But a major future war could make large permanent air bases extremely vulnerable. If an airfield can be disabled by a relatively small number of precision-guided missiles, the ability to disperse combat aircraft across small operating sites, highway strips, improvised bases, or ships becomes an enormous advantage.

This basic logic has already been implemented with the F-35B. Its engine drives a separate lift fan located behind the cockpit, while the rear exhaust nozzle can rotate downward. The system allows the aircraft to perform short takeoffs and vertical landings, although the STOVL capability comes at the cost of additional weight, mechanical complexity, and internal volume.

The AF-72 proposes a considerably more radical arrangement.

Judging by the author’s images and subsequent discussion, its propulsion system would contribute directly to vertical lift by changing the direction of engine thrust. This aspect of the design attracted some of the strongest criticism. One commenter noted that, with the proposed arrangement, exhaust from the rotating engines could interact with parts of the wing, potentially requiring substantial structural reinforcement and thermal protection.

And this reveals a fundamental contradiction: a long-range stealth fighter and a VTOL aircraft demand almost opposite things from their airframes.

The former needs maximum fuel capacity, minimum weight, and clean aerodynamics. The latter requires heavy thrust-vectoring mechanisms, additional ducts or openings, reinforced structures, and other specialized equipment.

A real AF-72 might therefore have to be produced in at least two versions: a conventional long-range fighter and a specialized short/vertical takeoff variant.

Supermaneuverability Without a Tail

Another interesting aspect of such an aircraft would be its potential maneuverability.

An aircraft without conventional vertical stabilizers requires continuous active assistance from its flight-control computers. By the time seventh-generation fighters appear, however, this should hardly represent a serious technological obstacle.

More importantly, further development of thrust-vectoring technology could change the very definition of aircraft maneuverability.

Today’s fighters still rely primarily on aerodynamic control surfaces, with thrust vectoring serving as an additional control mechanism. In the future, multidirectional thrust control could become a fully integrated method of controlling the aircraft around several axes.

This becomes particularly interesting in unmanned mode.

The human body limits the amount of sustained and instantaneous acceleration a manned fighter can exploit. The airframe itself may be capable of considerably more. If an AF-72-type aircraft were optionally manned, it could perform maneuvers in unmanned mode that would be dangerous or even impossible for a pilot inside the cockpit.

And this could genuinely become one of the defining characteristics of seventh-generation combat aircraft: the same aircraft could have different performance limits depending on whether a human is aboard.

Its Most Important Weapon May Not Be a Missile

If we try to take the AF-72 out of the world of concept art and place it in the real air warfare environment of the second half of the 21st century, its greatest advantage might not be its weapons at all.

Its most important weapon would be information.

The fighter could simultaneously receive data from satellites, ground-based radars, unmanned aircraft, other fighters, and its own sensors. Artificial intelligence would combine thousands of individual signals into a single tactical picture, identify the most dangerous targets, and determine or recommend the optimal method of attack.

The fighter itself would not necessarily need to operate its own radar at maximum power.

A target could be detected by a drone hundreds of kilometers away. Another platform could refine its coordinates. The AF-72 could then launch the weapon while remaining electronically silent and potentially undetected by the enemy.

The United States is effectively already moving in this direction. CCAs are officially intended to expand the capabilities of manned combat aircraft. A seventh-generation system could take this idea to its logical conclusion, transforming the pilot from someone who directly “flies the fighter” into the commander of an entire airborne combat formation.

What Could a Real AF-72 Actually Look Like?

Since RanmiT11 presented the AF-72 primarily as a visual concept, there are no official performance specifications. Nevertheless, judging by its apparent dimensions, intended role, and assumed technological level, we can construct a rough set of hypothetical characteristics.

Estimated AF-72 Specifications:

Crew — 1 pilot / fully unmanned mode
Configuration — integrated tailless design with flying-wing characteristics
Engines — two advanced turbofan engines with thrust-vectoring capability
Takeoff modes — conventional, short, and potentially vertical
Maximum speed — estimated at more than Mach 2
Cruising speed — supersonic without afterburner
Combat radius — approximately 1,500–2,500 km
Weapons carriage — internal weapon bays only in stealth configuration
Primary armament — future long- and very-long-range air-to-air missiles, precision air-to-surface weapons
Additional armament — potentially laser-based defensive systems
Avionics — distributed radar and electro-optical sensor architecture
Drone control — several or potentially dozens of autonomous wingmen
Stealth — all-aspect radar signature reduction combined with reduced infrared and electromagnetic signatures

All of these figures are speculative estimates, not characteristics stated by the concept’s creator.

But Will a Seventh Generation Ever Exist?

That is perhaps the most important question of all.

We have become accustomed to imagining combat aviation as a neat sequence of generations: fourth, fifth, sixth, and then inevitably seventh. But history is under no obligation to follow such a convenient classification.

By the middle of the 21st century, the very meaning of the word “fighter” may have changed dramatically.

Instead of a single aircraft, there could be a distributed combat system consisting of a manned command platform, reconnaissance drones, electronic-warfare aircraft, dedicated weapons carriers, and relatively inexpensive attack drones. Even today’s F-47 is being developed as part of the broader NGAD family of systems rather than simply as an isolated replacement for the F-22.

The true seventh-generation fighter may therefore look nothing like what we currently call a fighter.

But if manned combat aviation survives, the AF-72 concept provides an intriguing glimpse of one possible evolutionary path. Extreme range, very low observability, the elimination of conventional tail surfaces, advanced thrust vectoring, vertical takeoff capability, artificial intelligence, and control over formations of unmanned aircraft — all of these technologies either already exist in some form or are being actively developed.

The real fantasy of the AF-72 is not any single technology.

It is the attempt to combine all of them in one aircraft at the same time.

And that is exactly where the boundary between an attractive concept and real engineering becomes visible. Vertical takeoff adds weight. Long range demands fuel. Stealth requires carefully shielded intakes and internal weapon bays. Supermaneuverability places its own demands on aerodynamics and propulsion. Powerful future sensors and directed-energy weapons would require enormous amounts of electricity and fundamentally new cooling systems.

A real seventh-generation fighter would therefore inevitably be the product of countless compromises.

But if, one day, a huge tailless aircraft rises vertically above an improvised operating site, rotates its nozzles, accelerates into horizontal flight, and leads a formation of autonomous combat drones into battle, the AF-72 may no longer look quite so fantastical.