April 21, 2024 | International, Aerospace
July 23, 2018 | International, Aerospace
Boeing Pitches 'F-15X' Fighter Concept to US Air Force: Report
By Oriana Pawlyk
FARNBOROUGH, England -- There may be a new-old fighter jet on the horizon for the U.S. Air Force.
DefenseOne reports that Boeing Co. is pitching a new version of the F-15 Eagle as the service defines its inventory mix of fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft.
Known as F-15X, the fighter would be equipped with better avionics and radars and would carry more than two dozen air-to-air missiles, DefenseOne said, citing unnamed officials with knowledge of the plans.
The strategy would mimic what Boeing did with its Block III F/A-18 Super Hornet: taking an old concept, but boosting the jet fleets to be more potent in current and future missions with a larger variety of weapons, extended range, advanced targeting and sensor systems, and better fuel efficiency, among other enhancements.
"We see the marketplace expanding internationally," Gene Cunningham, vice president at Boeing for Global Sales for Defense, Space & Security, told reporters at the Royal International Air Tattoo on Friday. "And it's creating opportunities then to go back and talk to the U.S. Air Force about what might be future upgrades or even potentially future acquisitions of the F-15 aircraft."
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Boeing on Wednesday did not have further comment beyond Cunningham's remarks.
The move comes as officials in recent months have considered retiring the older F-15C/D fleet.
Last March, officials told lawmakers they were looking at plans to retire the two models as early as the mid-2020s. The service has 212 F-15C and 24 F-15D models, according to the Air Force Association's 2017 aircraft inventory almanac.
Air National Guard Director Lt. Gen. L. Scott Rice at the time said the service as a total force was in "deep discussions" regarding the retirement, with plans to further assess the F-15 inventory this year.
But the service is determining what it may procure for its combat-coded fleet going forward.
The Air Force is expected to soon debut its aviation road map on just how many fighter aircraft, and potentially other aircraft, it needs to sustain the future fight.
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson in May told Military.com the study may also outline the direction for how it trains and retains pilots for certain platforms.
Congress directed the service in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act to study the number of fighter and combat-coded squadrons it needs to plus-up to in order to remain ready, she said, similar to what the Navyrecently did with its 355-ship plan.
"What do we really need for force structure under this National Defense Strategy ... that work is underway now," Wilson said in an interview. "We have a first look that's due in August, and a report due to Congress in March.
"We've been directed to prepare for the re-emergence of great power competition," she said. "We have 301 operational squadrons today of all types, but how many do we really need and what types to confront this threat?"
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April 26, 2021 | International, Aerospace
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May 7, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval
The US Navy’s unmanned dream: A common control system
By: David B. Larter NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The U.S. Navy's growing and increasingly diverse portfolio of unmanned systems is creating a jumble of control systems, creating problems for a force that hopes robot ships, aircraft and submarines will help it regain a significant advantage over rivals China and Russia. One significant issue is having to train sailors on a number of different systems, which can prove time-consuming, inefficient and expensive. “From a manned-machine teaming and sailor-integration perspective, we need a portfolio of systems to do a wide variety of things,” said Capt. Pete Small, the head of unmanned maritime systems at Naval Sea Systems Command. “We can't bring a different interface for each platform to our sailors — from a training perspective but also from an integration perspective. “We might have a destroyer that needs to operate an [unmanned surface vessel] and an [unmanned underwater vehicle] and they all need to be linked back to a shore command center. So we've got to have common communications protocols to make that all happen, and we want to reduce the burden on sailors to go do that.” That's driving the Navy toward a goal of having one control system to run all the unmanned platforms in the service's portfolio: a goal that is a good ways away, Small said. “The end state is — future state nirvana — would be one set of software that you could do it all on,” he said. “I think that's a faraway vision. And the challenges are every unmanned system is a little bit different and has its own requirements. And each of the integration points — a destroyer, a shore base or a submarine — has slightly different integration requirements as well. “But the vision is that we can enjoy commonality as much as possible and share pieces of software wherever possible.” The effort mirrors a similar endeavor in the surface Navy to develop a single combat system that controls every ship's systems. The goal here is that if a sailor who is trained on a big-deck amphibious ship transfers to a destroyer, no extra training will be necessary to run the equipment on the destroyer. “That's an imperative going forward — we have to get to one, integrated combat system,” Rear Adm. Ron Boxall, the chief of naval operations' director of surface warfare, said in a December interview at the Pentagon with Defense News. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/navy-league/2019/05/06/the-us-navys-unmanned-dream-a-common-control-system