Lockheed Martin is reportedly pitching a new version of the stealthy F-22 Raptor air superiority fighter to the United States Air Force. But the new Raptor variant would not simply be a rehash of the original F-22, instead this new derivative would replace the original jet’s avionics and mission systems with hardware from Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Lockheed Martin is reportedly pitching a new version of the stealthy F-22 Raptor air superiority fighter to the United States Air Force. But the new Raptor variant would not simply be a rehash of the original F-22, instead this new derivative would replace the original jet’s avionics and mission systems with hardware from Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

It would also incorporate structural modifications and possibly Pratt & Whitney F135 engines or Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP) motors in place of the F119 engines that are installed on the current Raptors. As my former colleague Marcus Weisgerber reported for Defense One , the new F-22 derivative would incorporate the F-35’s much more modern mission system and “other advancements in the stealth coatings and things of that nature”—citing a person familiar with the proposal.

However, bringing the new F-22 derivative to fruition—assuming the U.S. Air Force were interested—would not be an easy or inexpensive task. The U.S. Air Force deemed restarting production of a slightly modified version of the basic F-22A version of the Raptor to be prohibitively costly in a February 2017 report to Congress .