This week we are launching our first subscriber reward: a curated directory of 40+ venture firms, corporate strategic arms, and government funds actively investing in defense, aerospace, and dual-use technology. Refer 3 readers with your personal link below (for subscribers) and the PDF lands in your inbox automatically.

If you spot an error or a missing fund, please let me know.

Mattt

The Project Fear YouTube channel released a thermal video this week showing what appears to be a previously unseen aircraft flying near Groom Lake. The War Zone's analysis points to features consistent with the Boeing F-47 sixth-generation fighter and its NGAD demonstrators. The footage, taken with a consumer thermal imager, shows a tailless, twin-engine airframe with aft-set lambda-style wings, prominent canard foreplanes, and a broad nose that may have a "double-arrowhead" profile. TWZ has further identified design similarities with the 1983 DP-21 "Christmas Tree" concept by Darold Cummings, one of the lead engineers on Northrop's YF-23. Cummings told TWZ that the Groom Lake images are intriguing and that a four-spike, B-2-style radar signature pattern remains a viable concept for a tactical fighter.

The Innovation Angle: The F-47 is the most secretive U.S. fighter program in development, with first flight not expected until 2028, so any visual reference to its lineage is significant. A four-spike configuration, once dismissed as impossible for fighter-sized aircraft because it requires a flying-wing geometry incompatible with high-alpha maneuvering, would essentially erase a tactical fighter's radar return from the head-on and tail aspects, the two viewing angles that matter most when penetrating contested territory. Cummings notes that modern flight control systems can stabilize the kind of unstable airframes such designs require, something 1983 hardware could not. Whatever the Project Fear video actually shows, the design references it has activated, including Tacit Blue, the YF-23, Bird of Prey, X-36, and DP-21, are the same lineage Boeing has publicly credited as feeding into the F-47. Decades of low-observable engineering are now converging against the question of what a credible sixth-generation airframe looks like.

Airbus Helicopters showed a full-scale mockup of the U145 at ILA Berlin on June 8, an uncrewed variant of its H145 light twin with the cockpit removed and the airframe reconfigured around cargo with an integrated nose door, foldable loading table, and dedicated cargo floor. Maximum takeoff weight is 3,800 kg (8,400 lb), with first flight planned for late 2026 and entry into service in the early 2030s. The U145 fits a broader pattern of converting established crewed rotorcraft into uncrewed systems rather than designing clean-sheet UAS: Sikorsky has done the same with the UH-60L Black Hawk (U-Hawk), and Airbus US is offering the UH-72B-derived MQ-72C to the US Marine Corps. The pitch is reuse of the H145's installed base of more than 1,800 aircraft and 8.5 million flight hours, with Airbus also partnering with MBDA on a drone-mothership variant for air-launched effects.

I read every message and would love to hear what's working, what's missing, or what you want to see more of.