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The Air Force expects to decide by the end of the year what actions aerospace giant Boeing may face for missing a delivery date for the first 18 new aerial tankers bought in generations.
The KC-46 Pegasus, based on the commercial version of the Boeing 767, is due to land in the Air Force fleet in January 2018, a delay of five months from a previously scheduled date of August 2017.
In an interview with this newspaper about the high-profile contract, the program executive officer of the Tanker Directorate at Wright-Patterson in charge of the KC-46 program said the Air Force takes the schedule slip “very seriously” as it targets a one-for-one replacement of the entire tanker fleet of 455 fuel-hauling jets plus two dozen more.
“It’s very important the KC-46 schedule delays resolve themselves,” Brig. Gen. Duke Z. Richardson said. “We’re pushing very hard.”
Of the transition to the new tanker, Richardson said, “We won’t be caught flat-footed.”
Boeing spokesman Charles B. Ramey said in an statement Tuesday the company would listen to the Air Force and address concerns in negotiations.
The KC-46 production system is “healthy” and the company is “continuing to build aircraft on pace for getting this capability to the Air Force as quickly as possible. The issues are well understood and we have a solid path forward,” the statement said.
Wear and tear
The delay comes as the Air Force’s aging fleet of tankers has dramatically shown signs of wear and tear just within the past two years.
The oldest tankers, the KC-135 Stratotankers, are more than 50 years old, while the KC-10 Extenders are into their third decade.
Both are workhorses that refuel military planes around the globe. In a snapshot of the first three quarters of this year , the refuelers offloaded a total of 138 million gallons of fuel to 93,000 aircraft. The tankers flew 174,000 flight hours.
“We like to say we fuel the fight, and if you look at what those tankers are doing every single day, it’s pretty clear that’s true,” Richardson said.
But maintaining an aging fleet is itself expensive and potentially dangerous, though Richardson said every aircraft passes an airworthiness test before allowed to fly after rolling out of the depot.
In fiscal year 2014, 40 percent of the KC 135’s that arrived for depot maintenance at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., required major structural repairs.
That soared to 90 percent in fiscal year 2016, the Directorate reported.
Common major repairs include replacing the upper wing skin, repairing the connection between the wing and wing box, and replacing a key part of the landing gear, according to the Air Force, which credits better inspection techniques for catching some of the problems.
After five years in the air, each KC-135 rolls through the maintenance depot at a cost of $12 million per tanker, Air Force statistics show.
Replacing the fleet, however, has not been without problems.
In a fixed-price $4.9 billion research and development contract, Boeing has absorbed about $1.9 billion in cost overruns. The Air Force awarded a $2.8 billion contract this summer for the first 19 planes.
While the KC-46 has had enough successes in flight tests to get the go-ahead for production, it faced glitches with an aerial refueling boom that caused delays. Richardson said those problems were fixed.
The Air Force plans to buy 179 of the new tankers through 2028. What might arrive after that hasn’t been decided, Richardson said. In the interim, the KC-135s and KC-10s will likely fly into the 2040s.
In future years, a competition will take place to choose a replacement beyond the KC-46. Aviation media reports this month have suggested the Air Force may consider a stealth tanker as a follow-on to the Pegasus to penetrate into hostile airspace.
A plane’s price tag
The Air Force has projected 175 KC-46s will cost $179 million a piece in fiscal year 2011 dollars. When research and development and other costs, including the first four test planes, are tabulated in that number rises to $223 million, said Daryl Mayer, an Air Force program spokesman.
“We are very comfortable and firm that that’s what it will be,” Richardson said. Future orders will be negotiated at a “not-to-exceed” price, officials said.
Dan Grazier, a fellow with the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C., questioned if Boeing could hold the cost on the new tanker over the long haul.
“Our biggest concern now with the current program is it certainly appears Boeing under bid and over promised on what they could deliver with this program,” he said.
Richard Aboulafia, a senior aviation analyst with the Virginia-based Teal Group, said in an email that given the steady build rate envisioned for the KC-46, “and given Boeing’s history of building over 1,000 767s, it’s very likely that they can build for the anticipated rate.”
“But given Boeing’s difficult history of trying to turn the 767 into a tanker, it’s a legitimate question about the KC-46’s actual unit cost,” he added.
Boeing declined to comment on projected costs.
“We’re not going to speculate about the future,” Ramey said in his email.
KC-46 in flight
In tests, the KC-46 has refueled an F-16 fighter jet, A-10 ground attack plane and using a drogue system refueled an F/A-18 and an AV-8B jump jet.
But the jet ran into refueling boom problems handling heavier loads refueling a C-17. Boeing installed a hydraulic relief valve which fixed the problem, Richardson said.
Over one-third of the tests have been completed, with thousands more data points that will be collected, he said.
“What we expect is if we find something it will be something we can manage,” he said. ”It won’t be something that inserts a very large delay in the program.”
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