February 21, 2020 | International, Aerospace
By: Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON — After more than a year of deliberations, the U.S. Air Force is hoping to have a fix in hand for the KC-46 tanker's most critical technical problem by the end of March, the service's top general told Defense News in an exclusive interview.
The hope is for the Air Force and Boeing to sign off next month on a finalized design for the KC-46's Remote Vision System, or RVS — a series of cameras and sensors that allow its users to steer the aircraft's boom into a plane for aerial refueling.
“The fact [is] that we're in negotiations right now; I can't say anything that would affect those negotiations,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein said in a Feb. 18 interview.
“Here's what I will tell you: They're not stagnant in any way, shape or form. It's a very active dialogue. We're working on getting a serious fix,” he said. “We're looking for a serious fix on the table by the end of March, and we're going to be flying that fix and starting to test it by the end of this summer.”
For several years, the KC-46 program has grappled with a critical deficiency involving the RVS, which is manufactured by Rockwell Collins. Under certain lighting conditions, the imagery is difficult to see and sometimes distorted, making it difficult for operators to safely move the boom without scraping the aircraft receiving fuel.
Despite ongoing RVS problems, the service and Boeing came to a compromise in late 2018 that would allow the aerospace firm to begin delivering the KC-46 if the company would swallow the cost of fixing the system to the Air Force's specifications.
At the time, Boeing and the service agreed on nine performance areas where the Air Force wanted to see improvements, but the parties have been embroiled in debate for months over how to turn those into technical requirements that would allow Boeing engineers to make specific hardware and software changes to the RVS design.
The first tanker was delivered in January 2019, but months later in September, Air Mobility Command head Gen. Maryanne Miller said Boeing had made no progress on the RVS and that it would take three to four years before the KC-46 was technically mature enough to deploy.
Tensions culminated in January 2020 when Goldfein sent a letter to incoming Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun criticizing the company for “unsatisfactory” progress on the RVS despite having a year to make design changes.
“We require your attention and improved focus on the KC-46,” Goldfein wrote in the Jan. 9 letter, which was first obtained by Bloomberg News. “The Air Force continues to accept deliveries of a tanker incapable of performing its primary operational mission.”
Calhoun came to the Pentagon for a face-to-face meeting with Goldfein on Jan. 15. According to Goldfein, the meeting went well.
“[Calhoun] committed to me in the meeting that the KC-46 was his top priority and he was going to put the talent, the resources and whatever the company needed to do to get it on track, so now I'm holding him to his word,” Goldfein said.
“I don't want to go into too many details because we're in a pretty intense negotiation, but I've seen a behavior change,” he added. Goldfein declined to provide examples of specific improvements but said he had seen “a different level of intensity from the leadership at Boeing on getting a serious fix for the KC-46.”
In a statement to Defense News, Boeing said it valued its partnership with the Air Force and is committed to delivering a KC-46 that matches the service's expectations.
“We're engaged in productive discussions with the Air Force about enhancements for the KC-46 Remote Vision System. We expect those discussions will establish a collaborative plan through which we can improve the aircraft's already robust capabilities,” the company said.
Having a finalized RVS fix on the books could be crucial for defending the Air Force's fiscal 2021 budget. The service plans to retire 13 KC-135 and 16 KC-10 tankers in FY21, but Congress has been skeptical of making reductions to the Air Force tanker fleet when demand continues to outpace supply.
An agreed-upon fix could also bring some financial relief for Boeing.
The Air Force is currently withholding $28 million per aircraft upon delivery of each tanker with the hopes of inducing Boeing to arrive at an RVS fix sooner rather than later. However, officials have said the service would be open to rolling back the amount of money the service withholds if it sees progress.
According to the terms of Boeing's fixed-price contract for the KC-46 program, the company is responsible for all costs past the award's $4.9 billion ceiling. Boeing has already eaten more than $3 billion in cost overruns, and the final price of the RVS redesign is still unknown and will likely trigger further penalties.
So far, 31 KC-46s out of the 179 planned for purchase have been delivered to the service. The Air Force indicated in 2019 that it would take three to four years to develop a fully functioning RVS.
March 23, 2024 | International, Naval
These systems will augment Germany's existing air defense infrastructure with additional Patriot equipment.
August 29, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security
U.S. agencies warn of Iranian hackers targeting key sectors with ransomware, exploiting security flaws to breach networks.
October 16, 2020 | International, Aerospace
Michael Bruno Western airlines are begging for more government aid, the International Air Transport Association does not expect the industry to see positive cash flow before 2022, and credit agency analysts forecast depressed aerospace and defense business activity for up to another 1.5 years. Meanwhile, data continues to portray China as the lone bright spot in the aviation world. By August, Chinese domestic flights had recovered to about 90% of 2019 levels. “China has been effectively controlling the spread of COVID-19, limiting cases to less than 100 a day. Combined with a large domestic market, the recovery in commercial aviation is expected to outpace the rest of the world,” Jefferies analysts Sheila Kahyaoglu and Greg Konrad noted in late September. “Right now, really, the two areas of traffic that are close to normal are domestic China and the roughly 2,000 all-cargo aircraft out there today,” echoes AeroDynamic Advisory Managing Director Kevin Michaels. Otherwise, “it's a bloodbath, and we're all aware of that,” he told an Aviation Week SpeedNews conference in September. For aerospace and defense (A&D) suppliers, the dichotomy sets up a critical decision: Should suppliers and servicers run toward China—or run away? It is easy to understand why they are debating the question. Long before COVID-19 gutted commercial air traffic and kick-started what is expected to be the greatest makeover of aircraft manufacturing and the maintenance, repair and overhaul industries since the dawn of the jet age, there were already good reasons to debate being in China. Topping the list was the Trump administration's trade war with the world's second-largest economy. Ongoing questions lingered about intellectual property rights and the specter of inadvertently creating future competitors in Avic, Comac and other Chinese companies. Proponents of reshoring industry to the U.S.—or “nearshoring” to Canada or Mexico—are certainly touting potential opportunity. “The logical thing is to fill longer-term and COVID-revealed supply chain gaps,” Reshoring Initiative President Harry Moser told an Aerospace and Defense Forum audience on Oct. 6. Others agree that conditions are ripe for reshoring, not least because automation and advanced technologies that replace humans can offset North American costs. Also, A&D has been deemed a critical part of U.S. infrastructure. And Chinese unit labor costs have risen fivefold in recent decades. This summer, site-selection consultant Duff & Phelps identified A&D as a top candidate for moving to America (see chart). But siting decisions are complex, and supply chain moves are even more so. Not only is commercial aviation looking strongest in China now and in the near future, but it could accelerate a long-expected toppling of the U.S. as the world's leading aviation market, possibly as soon as 2025. Increasingly, Beijing officials talk about relying on domestic supply instead of imports. Indeed, the “Sleeping Giant” could boast a future estimated aviation market value of more than $1 trillion, according to Yi Zhang, general manager of OCO Global China. That catches suppliers' attention. Zhang spoke in June to a well-attended webinar hosted by Washington state economic development officials about aerospace opportunities in China, and that was a month before Boeing revealed it was even thinking about scrapping 787 production in Puget Sound, Washington. Now China's opportunities beckon brighter with no snapback in Western air traffic. Still, in his Sept. 24 report titled “Caveat Venditor,” or “seller beware,” Vertical Research Partners analyst Rob Stallard cautions Western A&D companies against rushing toward China. “We see the Chinese government leveraging its position of relative post-COVID strength in coming years, and no doubt aerospace will see some of the fallout,” Stallard says. “As the biggest show in town, we would expect to see more quid pro quo in China's relationship with what is still very much a Western aerospace industry. Price, supply chain and technology transfer could be on the table, as could politics. “Aviation could conceivably suffer collateral damage as part of a broader trade war,” Stallard writes. “So while investors will probably see good news in a Chinese-led aero recovery, we would be looking for any strings attached.” https://aviationweek.com/aerospace/manufacturing-supply-chain/ad-industry-chinese-conundrum-get-or-out