The Government Accountability Office released a positive report this week on the Air Force's KC-46 tanker development effort, noting that the program has made solid progress in the last year.
Thursday, May 9, 2024
Thursday, May 9, 2024
The Government Accountability Office released a positive report this week on the Air Force's KC-46 tanker development effort, noting that the program has made solid progress in the last year.
A group of senators, led by California lawmakers backing a home-state company, wrote to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel yesterday urging him to push the Air Force to compete more of its space launches.
Air Force officials this week shared the limited details available about the service's plan to replace the current fleet of presidential aircraft, centered on an initial operational capability date of 2023 and with an acquisition strategy that remains quite vague.
The program executive officer for the Joint Strike Fighter today gave Congress new details on the F-35's development, noting an infusion of money from foreign partners has lowered the Pentagon's fiscal year 2015 funding needs for the program by $400 million.
The Pentagon yesterday announced the details behind its ninth Joint Strike Fighter low-rate initial production lot, which will include heavy international participation.
The Joint Strike Fighter program office believes modifying early-production Air Force F-35As from a basic configuration to a capable warfighting level will cost $6 million per jet, plus other associated expenses not included in that figure.
The Defense Department and National Nuclear Security Administration recently advanced the Long-Range Standoff missile program with the completion of two important milestones, even as the fiscal year 2015 budget delays LRSO development by three years.
The fiscal year 2015 budget justification documents that describe the Air Force's funding request in a detailed way were released this morning, providing much more information than has been previously available about all of its investment programs.
The Air Force's fiscal year 2015 budget has been designed so that new investments do not all reach their peak costs at once, helping the service stagger its procurement time lines, but the budget could still be altered significantly depending on congressional review and the future effects of sequestration, according to the service's under secretary.
The Pentagon's next-generation nuclear cruise missile will not begin development in fiscal year 2015 as scheduled and will instead slip by three years, deferring almost $1 billion in spending beyond FY-18.
A post-Afghanistan restructuring of the Air Force's command and control enterprise will include the near-term divestment of some E-8C and E-3G aircraft in exchange for long-term modernization efforts, according to fiscal year 2015 budget information released today by the Defense Department.
The Air Force has requested just more than $8 billion in fiscal year 2015 to fund its top three acquisition priorities -- the KC-46 tanker, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and Long-Range Strike Bomber -- as part of its FY-15 budget plan presented to Congress and the public today.
In an unusual programmatic move, the Air Force has not requested any fiscal year 2015 funding for the Combat Rescue Helicopter but will move forward with the program anyway, reflecting a slower-paced development effort being designed in consultation with Sikorsky.
NEWTON, MA -- Without giving away whether the fiscal year 2015 budget request will fund a replacement Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System aircraft, a high-ranking Air Force official this morning said replacing the current JSTARS platform could save billions of dollars compared to modernizing the existing 707-based fleet.
NEWTON, MA -- The Air Force is pushing to have its F-35 and F-22 fifth-generation fighters able to communicate in flight with legacy fighter aircraft before the end of this decade through an emerging program built off a limited, urgently developed capability in place today.
A nearly complete RAND Corp. study, which has already been briefed to Air Force leaders and members of Congress, recommends that the service replace its 45-year-old UH-1N Huey helicopters with excess, reconfigured Army UH-60 Black Hawks -- an attempt to recapitalize the outdated Huey fleet more affordably than by acquiring new aircraft.
An Air Force Global Positioning System satellite was thrust into orbit without a hitch last night aboard a Delta IV rocket booster provided by the United Launch Alliance.
The Air Force is planning a single- or multi-block upgrade of at least 80 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft delivered with software packages that include limited or no combat capability, with the aim of making them fully combat-capable. The move will add yet more near-term cost to the F-35 program but, the service hopes, lower the life-cycle cost of those aircraft over time and prevent the airplanes from being relegated to daytime training missions.
The National Nuclear Security Administration's portion of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb life-extension program remains on cost and schedule, having made its way through a trio of high-level cost assessments in the last year or so, according to a senior NNSA official.
U.S. Special Operations Command and the Air Force's 96th Test Wing completed the first flight of the specially modified AC-130J next-generation gunship on Jan. 31, with more complex tests set to begin this spring.