(Luft) USAF Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD)

[Nightwatch]

Ich denke das ist eine ganz gute Zusammenfassung der Geschichte zur 35, meine Ergänzung dann im letzten Absatz.

2.5 Lockheed Martin F-35

The F-35 designation for the Joint Strike Fighter is the latest in a line of out-of-sequence designations. What's new about this one is the history of its creation. On 26 October 2001, a press conference was held at the Pentagon to announce the winner of the JSF competition, held between the Boeing X-32 and the Lockheed Martin X-35. When the X-35 had been declared the winner, one of the questions asked was about the designation for the production JSF. USD ATL (Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisitions, Technology and Logistics) Edward C. "Pete" Aldridge mentioned the X-35 designator of the Lockheed Martin demonstrators, briefly exchanged a few words with his co-presenter, JSF Program Manager Major General Mike Hough, and then said it would be called "F-35". That's it. The transcript of the press conference can still be found here.

As it turned out, no designation whatsoever had been reserved, let alone approved, for the production JSF at that time, and Aldrigde and Hough - obviously not knowing much about the aircraft designation system used in their department - simply replaced the X by an F. Of course, just about everyone interested in the subject had expected the logical designation of F-24. In fact, Lockheed Martin had also expected this, and was reportedly a bit upset about the turn of events, apparently already having referred to the hoped-for production JSF in-house as the "F-24".

The official request for MDS designations for the three JSF variants was placed by the JSF Program Office on 17 December 2001. The paragraph requesting "F-35" said:
It is the program office's desire to designate the JSF as the F-35. This request is consistent with the statement made by the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquistition, Technology and Logistics during the public announcement of the contract award. He said the JSF would be called the F-35. This is also consistent with the X-35 designation of the Lockheed concept demonstration aircraft. The USAF, USMC, and USN variants will have the Series designators of A, B, and C respectively.

It was not before 16 April 2002 that the requests for F-35A, F-35B and F-35C (for the CTOL, STOVL and CV variants respectively) were forwarded by the USAF Nomenclature Office to HQ USAF/XPPE for approval. This is an unusually long delay, and may indicate that there was much discussion about the validity of the F-35 designation and/or the reasoning why it should be assigned (the latter boiling down to "It should be 'F-35' because some high-ranking but ill-informed official said so"). Nevertheless, the Nomenclature Office included the following paragraph in its letters (example for F-35A):
The last fighter aircraft was assigned YF-23A, and therefore this aircraft should be assigned F-24A as design numbers are to be assigned consecutively according to AFJI 16-401. This office recommends the designation be F-24A.

However, the recommendation was to no avail, and on 5 June 2002 HQ USAF confirmed the F-35 designations (without further commenting on the F-24/35 controversy).

Note: As of December 2006, the official USAF biography of Col. Joseph A. Lanni says that he has flown classified prototypes, and lists YF-24 among the types he has flown. It appears that the YF-24 designation has been used (semi-)officially for an as yet undisclosed aircraft. Since this YF-24 designation reportedly came into existence before 2001, it put the DOD into a dilemma when designating the JSF: Either use F-24, and confuse anyone who is cleared to know about the secret YF-24, or use F-25, and be flooded by questions about F-24 (the whole "F-19 game" again)! So the apparently "accidental" selection of F-35 for the JSF would have been an easy way out. After all, the public was already used to the assignment of out-of-sequence numbers for all kinds of reasons.

https://designation-systems.net/usmilav/...l#_MDS_F35

Das sich das je nochmal final klären lassen wird halte ich für unwahrscheinlich. Es wird kaum jemals was veröffentlicht und wenn doch, dann meistens nur um andere Programme zu verschleiern. Zeit spielt da keine Rolle, schon aus den Siebzigern sind immernoch nicht alle Muster rund um XST und BSAX bekannt.