U.S. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley says the service is committed to funding an F-16 life extension, especially in light of the most recently announced Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) slip, as well as a new bomber aircraft in the forthcoming Fiscal 2012 budget due next month on Capitol Hill.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced last week a commitment to funding a new bomber that will provide long-range, penetrating strike capabilities and be optionally manned (Aerospace DAILY, Jan. 7).
Donley declined to describe the schedule for the bomber or the desired number of aircraft. During a program started a few years ago, officials notionally discussed around 100 bombers.
“In contrast to the program canceled in 2009 ... development of this new bomber will leverage more mature technologies and we think will reduce risk in [the] program and allow us to deliver with greater confidence on the schedule and in quantities sufficient to support the long-term sustainment of long-term bomber capabilities after the current fleets of B-1s and B-52s continue to retire,” Donley told an audience Jan. 12 in Washington hosted by the Air Force Association. “We’ll constrain the requirements for this platform and there is certainly more emphasis on affordability.”
Though the aircraft must be “nuclear certified,” Donley says industry should not assume that the aircraft will support the nuclear mission immediately. “We are really making a shift here from designing bombers for the nuclear mission and having them have conventional capability. That shift now has been reversed,” he says. “We are looking at long-term force structure and long-range strike capabilities that we are assuming are going to be used on the conventional side, because that is how they have been used.” Likely prime competitors for this work are Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
F-16 SLEP
A service-life extension of the Lockheed Martin F-16 also is likely, in part because of a further slip to F-35 JSF development and the Pentagon’s decision in the Fiscal 2012 budget to slash 124 of the Lockheed Martin aircraft from the buy, reducing the production ramp rate.
“There is still work to be done on the program,” Donley says of F-35, noting that more progress is needed in software and testing. Gates has slipped the conclusion of flight testing from mid-2015 to the end of the first quarter of 2016, and the department has “taken an even more conservative approach to production rates as we go forward.”
The Pentagon also is decoupling flight testing of the short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing (Stovl) version from progress in the conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) and carrier version (CV) to insulate the development of the latter from further perturbations to the Stovl schedule.
The Air Force is the lead customer for CTOL and last year slipped its initial operational capability date to 2016 from 2014; Donley says that it is “implied” by the new development schedule that the in-service date will shift further.
Despite the slip in producing F-35s, the Pentagon plans to allocate funding for 16 additional F-35 flight simulators to help boost throughput of pilots for the single-engine, stealthy strike aircraft. Availability of production aircraft for training could slip, and simulators might be an option to at least begin training pilots in advance of their aircraft being delivered to the training unit at Eglin AFB, Fla.
The Air Force also is crafting a path for an F-16 service-life extension program (Slep). “As we consider the impacts of this conservative approach to Joint Strike Fighter ... we anticipated we would need to take a look at F-16 Sleps,” Donley says. “That question is more ‘how much and when and what kind,’ rather than an if.” He says more refined plans are forthcoming with the Fiscal 2012 budget, which will likely be released Feb. 14.
The budget also will propose an acceleration for outfitting the F-15 fleet with active electronically scanned array radars, which are made by Raytheon. Donley says the service will complete installation of the radar onto the C version one year earlier and the E version eight years earlier.
These various efforts were possible in part because of a massive budget drill that produced $34 billion in savings over the next five years of Air Force spending. This allowed for the service to redirect those funds for use in higher priority programs.
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