Air Force (Army Air Corps) News

[kscarbel2]

The B1 bomber - The under-appreciated workhorse of America’s air wars

The Washington Pose / December 30, 2015

The huge swing-wing airplane is nothing if not flexible — canceled, revived, converted from nuclear strike plane to conventional bomber and then to flying arsenal for the GPS-guided bombs on which ground troops fighting for their lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Syria often rely.

And if the U.S. Air Force’s supersonic B-1 bomber is one other thing, it’s misunderstood.

It’s no secret that the B-1 bomber, officially called the Lancer but known to its four-man crews as the “Bone” (they proudly call themselves “Bone-drivers”), had a troubled early life. Canceled by President Jimmy Carter and revived by successor Ronald Reagan, the B-1 underwent sweeping redesigns before it reached Air Force crews in the mid-1980s — and even then, the revamped airplane suffered a string of high-profile malfunctions and crashes. Not until 1998, three decades after the distinctive swing-wing bomber was first designed, did the B-1 first drop bombs on enemy targets in Iraq.

In public forums, the B-1 has often been a punch line. A glowing New York Times feature earlier this month on the B-1’s older, slower brother, the gangly B-52, highlighted the tribulations of the supersonic bomber’s development, comparing it unfavorably to the reliable B-52 of “Dr. Strangelove” fame, which has been in uninterrupted service since the 1950s.

And during a Senate hearing last year, Sen. John McCain pushed back hard on Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James’s description of the B-1 as an effective airplane for “close air support,” or the delivery of precision-guided bombs in support of embattled ground troops. “That’s a remarkable statement,” McCain scoffed. “That doesn’t comport with any experience I’ve ever had, nor anyone I know has ever had.”

What McCain didn’t seem to be aware of, and what the Times report failed to note, is the long third act of the B-1’s life. Converted in the 1990s from a Soviet-airspace-penetrating nuclear strike plane to a conventional bomber meant to pound the infrastructure and massed formations of an enemy army, the “Bone” converted again in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, into exactly what the Arizona senator found so hard to believe: not just a close air support plane, but, by all accounts, a hugely successful one.

One need only watch this video below of a B-1 strike in Afghanistan’s ultra-violent Pech valley, and listen to the profanity-laden commentary of the ground troops doing the filming, to get a sense of the role the big bomber played supporting troops in contact in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In the video, originally uploaded to YouTube by a military spokesperson, troops at a remote firebase watch as three satellite-guided bombs from a B-1 strike mountainside targets almost simultaneously, followed seconds later by a fourth. The soldiers express their elation in not-safe-for-civilian-work terms.

By the time of the airstrike depicted in the video, Bone-drivers had been flying their dark gray planes 20,000 feet over Afghanistan for years — since the opening night of the U.S.-led air war in October 2001, when five B-1s flying out of the Indian Ocean outpost of Diego Garcia joined ten B-52s and two B-2 stealth bombers in pummeling the Taliban regime’s few fixed-site targets.

One pilot who flew B-1s in the early months of the Afghan war, Jordan Thomas, had been working at the Air Force’s B-1 training school the summer before the September 11 attacks when he fielded what seemed at the time like an odd inquiry from a Congressional staffer. (Part of the B-1 fleet was on the chopping block as a cost-cutting measure, making the bomber a subject of Congressional and media interest.) “This staffer asked whether it was true that the B-1 wasn’t able to fly over high mountains like in Afghanistan, which he’d read somewhere,” Thomas remembered. “I wrote back, ‘We can fly over the mountains of Afghanistan, but why on earth would we?’”

Working with fellow Bone-drivers in the skies over those very mountains and back on Diego Garcia, Thomas helped the B-1 crews develop what would become their essential skill in the years ahead: coordinating with ground troops to drop firefight-ending bombs with lethal precision and accuracy. “We were given an opportunity in Afghanistan to prove what the B-1 could do,” Thomas said.

The plane’s success aiding the ouster of the Taliban gained it a moment of appreciation, and saved the B-1 fleet from the cuts that defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a B-1 skeptic, had been pressing before the September 11 attacks. “Maligned B-1 Bomber Now Proving Its Worth,” a Los Angeles Times headline trumpeted two months into the bombing.

Day-to-day coverage of the fall 2001 air campaign, though, emphasized the B-52. The B-1 was mentioned only occasionally, even though in fact, B-1s and B-52s were flying roughly equal numbers of missions — and the newer B-1s were actually outpacing their older siblings in numbers of bombs dropped, especially smart bombs.

The misrepresentation bothered some of the Bone-drivers on Diego Garcia. Thomas had a theory about what was going on: because the B-52s flew mostly during daylight hours and the B-1s mostly at night, journalists accompanying the Northern Alliance troops on the ground could only see (and photograph) the B-52s, and mistakenly assumed the same planes were carrying out the night bombardments.

In the years that followed, the B-1 became a mainstay of close air support and other strike missions over both Afghanistan and Iraq, where a B-1 kicked off the air war in 2003 with a string of bombs meant to kill Saddam Hussein in one of his Baghdad palaces (he wasn’t there). “We are using it in ways never conceived of previously,” secretary of the Air Force James Roche said of the B-1 later that year. Capable of flying in rougher weather than the B-52, cheaper to operate, and capable of carrying more bombs, in 2006 the B-1 displaced the B-52 and became the standard bomber deployed to support ground troops in the two wars, while the older aircraft played the traditional nuclear deterrent role.

One unit whose veterans sing the B-1’s praises is the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, which, during 15 months in the Pech and adjoining Afghan valleys in 2007-8, became the most heavily decorated Army battalion of the post-September 11 wars. “Our favorite asset at the company level was the B-1,” said one of the unit’s company commanders, Lou Frketic. “They had more ordnance and longer loiter times, and they delivered ordnance to the desired location without trying to second-guess us with their own optics.”

“What I loved about the B-1 was that it had such incredible payload capacity and such incredible time on station,” the battalion’s fire support officer, Jeffrey Pickler, agreed. “We dropped over a million pounds of Air Force bombs, and a lot of that was B-1s.” When insurgents attacked from rock formations high in the mountains, artillery and mortars would respond first, trying to get the enemy to take cover; then bombs from a B-1 or another airplane would smash the militants’ natural bunkers before attack helicopters arrived to pick off survivors.

On one of the worst of many bad nights in the battalion’s deployment — Oct. 25, 2007, when a sharp firefight in the Korengal valley left two paratroopers dead and earned one wounded soldier the first Medal of Honor awarded to living recipient since Vietnam — it was a B-1 whose bombs shook the battle-scarred ridge, pounding the escaping insurgents.

As with the AC-130 gunship that destroyed an international hospital in Afghanistan this fall, the B-1’s destructive power is a double-edged sword: if it strikes the wrong target, the damage to civilians or friendly forces can be severe. “It was like Judgment Day,” a survivor of an errant 2008 B-1 strike that killed dozens of civilians told Human Right Watch. And in June 2014, a B-1 dropped a bomb on a special operations team in Afghanistan, killing five U.S. soldiers and one Afghan. The latter error was chalked up to a misunderstanding by the bomber’s own crew of how far away the plane’s sensors could detect the ground troops’ identifying infrared strobe lights.

When targeting pods with high-tech surveillance cameras were added to B-1s in 2008 (they were also fielded to the B-52), “It transformed the nature of the aircraft,” according to retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, an airpower advocate who flew both bombers while he was on active duty. Besides dropping bombs — which they could do with greater precision, hopefully helping to cut down on civilian casualties — Bone crews gained the ability able to watch over ground troops’ shoulders for potential threats, supplementing the stressed fleet of Predator and Reaper drones designed for that purpose.

The first B-1 crew to drop bombs in America’s latest air campaign over Iraq got the call one day in August 2014. Already on the runway getting ready for a routine mission over Afghanistan, according to an Air Force Times report, the crew plugged in new coordinates and headed for the skies around Baghdad to support Iraqi ground forces. As the U.S.-led bombing campaign against the Islamic State expanded, it became the focus of a full squadron of B-1s, aircraft from which, on 31 occasions during their deployment, “went Winchester,” dropping all the bombs they had on board.

Of the missions where Bone-drivers dropped all their bombs, many took place over the northern Syrian city of Kobane. In an air campaign whose slow pace has drawn criticism, the four-month bombardment of Kobane stood out for its punishing tempo, and the B-1 was at the heart of it, dropping bombs at the direction of rear-area U.S. air controllers who relayed strike requests from Kurdish troops on the ground. By the time the Islamic State’s grip on Kobane broke last January, the B-1’s distinctive shape was a familiar sight in the sky above the city.

The next B-1 squadron to deploy to the Middle East played a similar role supporting ground offensives by Iraqi troops in Tikrit this spring – “We kill bad people and we break their things, and we’re very good at it,” the squadron’s commander told a South Dakota journalist after the unit’s return home – and yet a third squadron’s B-1s were on hand during last month’s seizure of Sinjar, in between the Islamic State strongholds of Mosul and Raqqa, by Kurdish forces.

“We focused first on northern Syria, then northeastern Iraq, then Sinjar,” the currently deployed B-1 squadron’s commander told the Washington Post. (Air Force spokespeople made the officer available on the condition that only his rank, lieutenant colonel, and first name, Joseph, be published.) “We have definitely gone Winchester many times.”

The officer’s 37th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron has struck Islamic State command posts, training camps, and oil production facilities, he explained. But the most satisfying missions have been those in direct support of friendly ground troops in both countries, most recently around the embattled Iraqi city of Ramadi.

That was where, in a particularly memorable recent mission, Iraqi troops requested that the squadron commander and his crew do something about small boats that Islamic State fighters were using for transport. Watching with their targeting pod, the crew waited until the boats clustered under a bridge, and then destroyed the bridge with satellite-guided bombs. “That was different,” the B-1 squadron commander said. “I never expected to be dropping ordnance on boats.”

A single B-1 can drop as many bombs on Syrian and Iraqi targets as 40 attack jets flying off an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, noted retired Air Force general Deptula, making the bomber’s importance to the air campaign obvious. “The B-1 carries so much payload, and has so much endurance, its persistence can’t be matched by other platforms” like smaller attack jets and the B-52, he said. “It is both more effective and more efficient.”

To Rep. Chris Stewart, a Congressman from Utah who was a Bone-driver before he was a politician and tries to stay up to date on his plane’s wartime employment, the prominent role B-1s play today in the campaign against the Islamic State comes as no surprise — notwithstanding the dismissal of the supersonic bomber in the recent New York Times paean to the B-52.

“That article was so 1977,” Stewart joked. “Every airplane goes through a maturing process, but the B-1 has proven itself again and again, and for a long time. It’s the B-1 that’s the backbone of the bomber fleet.”

[eddeere]

Interesting. I worked on the B52's in the early 70's. They were the D and G models old but great planes. Some of my friend who stayed in the air force had nothing but praise for the B1.

[kscarbel2]

More Air Force drones are crashing than ever as new problems emerge

The Washington Post / January 19, 2015

A record number of Air Force drones crashed in major accidents last year, documents show, straining the U.S. military’s fleet of robotic aircraft when it is in more demand than ever for counterterrorism missions in an expanding array of war zones.

Driving the increase was a mysterious surge in mishaps involving the Air Force’s newest and most advanced “hunter-killer” drone, the Reaper, which has become the Pentagon’s favored weapon for conducting surveillance and airstrikes against the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and other militant groups.

The Reaper has been bedeviled by a rash of sudden electrical failures that have caused the 2¹/₂-ton drone to lose power and drop from the sky, according to accident-investigation documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Investigators have traced the problem to a faulty starter-generator, but have been unable to pinpoint why it goes haywire or devise a permanent fix.

All told, 20 large Air Force drones were destroyed or sustained at least $2 million in damage in accidents last year, the worst annual toll ever, according to a Washington Post investigation. The Pentagon has shrouded the extent of the problem and kept details of most of the crashes a secret.

The aircraft losses pose another challenge for the Air Force as it struggles to provide sufficient drone coverage for counterterrorism operations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Mali and Cameroon, among other countries.

Despite a surge in requests from field commanders, the Air Force last year had to curtail its drone combat missions by 8 percent because of an acute shortage of pilots for the remote-controlled aircraft. Things have gotten so bad that the Air Force is offering retention bonuses of up to $125,000 to its drone pilots, who have long complained of overwork.

The Air Force also has contracted out more drone missions to private companies to meet what one general called “a virtually insatiable appetite” from military commanders for airborne surveillance.

While Air Force leaders have publicly bemoaned a lack of personnel and resources, they have said little about the high number of drone crashes, a long-standing vulnerability that worsened substantially last year.

Ten Reapers were badly damaged or destroyed in 2015, at least twice as many as in any previous year, according to Air Force safety data.

The Reaper’s mishap rate — the number of major crashes per 100,000 hours flown — more than doubled compared with 2014. The aircraft, when fully equipped, cost about $14 million each to replace.

The Air Force’s other primary drone model, the Predator, also suffered heavy casualties.

An older and less capable version of the Reaper, the Predator was involved in 10 major accidents last year. That’s the most since 2011, when the U.S. military was simultaneously surging troops into Afghanistan and withdrawing ground forces from Iraq.

Although the Defense Department has a policy to disclose all major aircraft mishaps, it did not publicly report half of the 20 Reaper and Predator accidents last year.

In five other cases, U.S. military officials provided confirmation only after local authorities reported the crashes or enemy fighters posted photos of the wreckage on social media.

According to the military, only one drone was downed by hostile forces: a Predator that was hit by Syrian air defenses near Latakia on March 17.

All but one of the 20 Air Force drone accidents last year occurred overseas. Six drones crashed in Afghanistan. Four crashed in the Horn of Africa, near a U.S. military base in Djibouti. Three crashed in Iraq. There were also crashes in Kuwait, Turkey, Syria and Libya.

In two cases, Air Force officials would not identify the country where the mishaps occurred.

In addition to the Air Force, the Army operates its own drone fleet. It is preparing to expand the number of combat missions it flies to help compensate for the Air Force’s cutbacks.

Last year, the Army reported four major drone crashes, each involving the Gray Eagle — a model identical to the Predator. Three of the Army’s accidents occurred in Afghanistan. One happened in Iraq.

Although the military’s drone programs are largely unclassified, the Obama administration rarely discusses details of the key role they fill in its counterterrorism strategy. The CIA runs its own drone operations on a covert basis, and the secrecy surrounding those missions often seeps into the Pentagon.

Lt. Gen. Robert P. Otto, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence and surveillance programs, acknowledged in an interview that there has been a spike in Reaper accidents.

Many cases remain under investigation, but Otto and other Air Force officials blamed the Reaper’s flawed starter-generator for causing at least six major crashes since December 2014.

“We’re looking closely at that to determine what is the core issue there,” Otto said.

Although the drone pilot shortage has compelled the Air Force to reduce the number of combat missions, Otto said the aircraft mishaps have not forced additional cuts. The Air Force has enough replacement drones on hand, he said, and already had orders in place to buy dozens more Reapers over the next few years.

“Any impact to operations has been negligible to barely noticeable,” he said.

Field commanders, however, have long complained of a drone deficit. In March, the four-star commanders of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Africa both told Congress that the Pentagon has provided less than one-quarter of the drones, other aircraft and satellites that they need for reconnaissance and surveillance missions.

“The Predator has been our most effective weapon in our campaign against the global jihadists,” said Michael G. Vickers, the Pentagon’s former top civilian intelligence official, at a House Armed Services Committee hearing Jan. 12. But he cautioned that the size of the drone fleet “will remain a critical limiting factor in the conduct of our campaign.”

Drones going ‘stupid’

Military drones have been dogged by persistent safety and reliability problems since the first Predator was deployed to the Balkans on a combat mission two decades ago.

Of the 269 Predators purchased by the Air Force since then, about half have been destroyed or badly damaged in accidents, records show.

Air Force officials describe the Predator as an experimental aircraft that was rushed into war zones, particularly after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. They say it has lasted much longer than expected and that, at a cost of$4 million apiece, is relatively expendable in the event of a crash.

The Air Force has about 140 Predators left and plans to retire them all by 2018. They are gradually being replaced by the Reaper.

Introduced in 2007, the Reaper can fly twice as far as the Predator and carry more bombs and missiles. Until recently, it also had a much better safety record.

Over the past three years, however, some production models of the Reaper have been hobbled by an outbreak of electrical failures.

Investigators and engineers have traced the problem to the starter-generator. It powers the drone but is prone to conking out, for reasons that remain unclear.

The Reaper carries an emergency battery backup system. But the batteries last only for about one hour. If a malfunctioning drone needs more time than that to reach an airfield, it is in trouble.

In such emergencies, the drone pilot usually has no choice but to intentionally crash the aircraft in a remote area, such as a mountainside or a waterway, to avoid striking people on the ground. No one has died in a military drone accident, though many catastrophes have been narrowly averted, documents show.

“Once the battery’s gone, the airplane goes stupid and you lose it,” said Col. Brandon Baker, chief of the Air Force’s remotely piloted aircraft capabilities division. “Quite frankly, we don’t have the root cause ironed out just yet.”

The Reaper and the Predator are both manufactured by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, a San Diego-based defense contractor. In addition to the Air Force, other customers who have purchased the Reaper include the Department of Homeland Security, NASA, and the British, French and Italian armed forces. The CIA also flies Reapers.

General Atomics officials declined requests for an interview or to provide data on the Reaper’s history of starter-generator failures.

In an emailed statement, General Atomics spokeswoman Kimberly Kasitz said the firm “stands behind the proven reliability” of the Reaper. She added that Reapers have recorded more than 2.2 million flight hours and have “been very effective for multiple customers.”

The Reaper’s starter-generator is built by Skurka Aerospace of Camarillo, Calif.

Skurka executives referred requests for comment to their parent corporation, Transdigm Group of Cleveland. A Transdigm spokeswoman did not respond to phone calls or emails.

Averting disaster

Government agencies other than the Pentagon have also run into problems with their Reapers.

Shortly before midnight Jan. 27, 2014, an unarmed Reaper was flying a surveillance mission near San Diego for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Suddenly, an alarm sounded, signaling that the starter-generator had stopped working.

The crew flying the drone from a remote-control ground station in Corpus Christi, Tex., inputted commands to restart the generator, but their attempt failed. The pilot made quick calculations and concluded that the Reaper lacked enough battery power to make it back to its launch point, at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., according to an aircraft accident report by Customs and Border Protection.

Worried that the Reaper might otherwise crash into a heavily populated part of Southern California, the pilot commanded the drone to head out to sea, where it was ditched about 23 miles west of Point Loma, Calif.

The drone sank about 4,200 feet to the ocean floor. Ten days later, most of the wreckage, including the intact starter-generator, was recovered from the depths by a Navy salvage team.

According to the accident investigation report, it was the 18th time in nine months that a starter-generator had failed on a Reaper. Disaster was averted in most cases, but in three of the incidents, the drone crashed.

Working with engineers from General Atomics, investigators identified three parts of the starter-generator that were susceptible to breakdowns. But they couldn’t figure out why they were failing.

No pattern was apparent. Older units had failed, but so had brand-new ones. There was no correlation with operating locations or conditions. The Customs and Border Protection investigation blamed an “unknown factor” that was “likely external.”

The report noted that, unlike most aircraft, the Reaper lacked a backup, or redundant, power supply system. Calling it a “design weakness,” the report recommended that Reapers be equipped with a permanent backup electrical supply.

Two days after the crash near San Diego, General Atomics issued an alert bulletin to its customers, advising them to limit “non-essential” Reaper operations to keep the drones within one hour’s flight of an air base in case of an emergency.

The bulletin, however, did not apply to combat missions.

Crashes pile up

General Atomics engineers made little headway in identifying the mechanical gremlin that was plaguing the starter-generators. Meanwhile, Reapers kept crashing.

On Dec. 12, 2014, a Reaper armed with missiles and bombs experienced a starter-generator failure about 90 minutes after it took off from Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan.

As the batteries drained, the crew intentionally flew the drone into a mountain. The wreckage was not recovered.

“I thought it was a very prudent place to ditch it, onto a high mountain top,” the unidentified mission crew commander told Air Force investigators, according to the accident-investigation report. “Our deal is we try to do it into high mountain tops.”

Less than two months later, on Feb. 4, 2015, an Air Force Reaper had to cut short a surveillance mission over Somalia when its starter-generator died.

The flight crew tried to rush the drone back to its base in Djibouti. But with about 30 miles to go, the battery ran out and the Reaper was ditched in the sea, according to the Air Force’s accident investigation report.

In an appendix to the report, General Atomics noted that it had completed the development of a “more robust” starter-generator in response to the string of mishaps. The appendix, which was heavily redacted, did not give further details.

In March, the Air Force’s program manager for its Reaper fleet filed a report with the Pentagon noting that there had been “a dramatic increase” in starter-generator failures since 2013.

Col. William S. Leister informed Pentagon officials that investigators from the Air Force, General Atomics and Skurka had investigated the problem for more than a year. The team, he said, had identified “numerous manufacturing quality issues” yet had been unable to determine the exact cause of the failures.

“But, I am pleased to report that we may have light at the end of this dark tunnel,” he added, promising unspecified “corrective actions in the very near term.” He declined to comment further for this article.

Other Air Force officials said the service began installing a secondary generator on its Reapers in July that can provide up to 10 extra hours of electricity in case the first one fails.

The Air Force determined that 60 Reapers in its fleet were carrying the buggy starter-generators. So far, the new backup part has been installed on 47 of those aircraft, according to Baker, the colonel in charge of the drone capabilities division.

Since then, Baker said, there have been 17 “saves” — or incidents in which the primary generator failed mid-flight. In each case, he added, the backup generator kicked in and the drone was able to land safely.

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[kscarbel2]

With aging jets and a shortage of pilots, the Air Force weighs buying throwback ‘light-attack’ planes

The Washington Post  /  February 28, 2017

The U.S. Air Force, faced with a potentially protracted war against the Islamic State, aging fighter jets and a shrinking force of pilots, is examining the adoption of a new fleet of “light-attack” planes that are both a throwback to earlier U.S. operations and a current staple of militaries in South America and the Middle East.

The aircraft would be able to carry out airstrikes against the Islamic State and other militants for less money than the F-16 Fighting Falcon or the F/A-18 Super Hornet. Options available could include Embraer’s A-29 Super Tucano propeller plane, which the United States has delivered to Afghanistan and other allies, and Beechcraft’s AT-6, a version of which the U.S. military already uses in pilot training.

Air Force generals have discussed the proposal several times in recent weeks, saying that the planes could supplement existing aircraft, including drones, in regions where there is no enemy capable of shooting down U.S. planes. Gen. David L. Goldfein, the service’s top officer, said the proposal is part of an ongoing dialogue that dates back years and could soon include an experiment in which private companies demonstrate what the planes can do.

“I’m not interested in something that requires a lot of research and development here,” Goldfein said during a recent appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I’m looking for something that I can get at right now, commercial, off the shelf, low-cost, that can operate in an uncontested environment, that can deliver the capabilities that we need, that can also be something that perhaps our allies and partners that are in this fight with us” use.

Goldfein added: “If you assume this fight will be going on for a little bit of time, there is room and time for us to get after this.”

The experiment will follow related efforts in Iraq and the United States. In the most recent, U.S. Central Command deployed two Vietnam-era, twin-engine OV-10G Broncos on loan from NASA to Iraq in 2015, flying them in missions against the Islamic State to assess how light-attack planes might help in the air war.

The experiment was described by Navy Capt. Andy Walton in an article last year in Proceedings Magazine, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute. He detailed one mission over Iraq in an OV-10G in which he and a colleague observed militants for hours as they traveled down the Tigris River in canoes, and then fired on them with laser-guided rockets.

The use of the planes was the latest step in a program called Combat Dragon II, which dates back nearly a decade and involves Special Operations Command. Goldfein cited it recently, noting that some testing was carried out when he was the commander of Air Forces Central Command from August 2011 to July 2013. One of his bosses at the time was Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, now defense secretary, who supported the program as chief of U.S. Central Command.

The Air Force published a paper in 2008 that identified the need for a plane that could carry out both attacks and aerial observation. It called the plane “OA-X” and said continued reliance on other aircraft, ranging from the B-1 bomber to the F-16, at “rates that are much higher than planned and programmed” would wear them out.

The Air Force, the paper said, “faces a critical gap in its ability to conduct air support for extended periods in the Long War,” a reference to counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations worldwide. It recommended that the aircraft should have an armored protection for the crew and engine, missile warnings and countermeasures, among other features.

Air Force officials estimate that the cost of flying a propeller plane like the A-29 or AT-6 would be a few thousand dollars per hour. In comparison, it costs about $18,000 per hour to fly the A-10 attack jet. Other hourly costs are: $19,000 for the F-16; $24,000 for the F-15E; $42,000 for the F-35A; $44,000 for the AC-130J; $62,000 for the F-22A; $63,000 for the B-52; $77,000 for the B-1B; and $120,000 for the B-2, according to service statistics.

The light-attack effort has new momentum in part because one of its chief critics in Congress, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has shifted his opinion on the U.S. military experimenting with the aircraft. In 2011, he criticized research the Navy wanted to do for Combat Dragon as unnecessary because of the existence of the A-10, the slow-moving jet that has long carried out close-air support for U.S. troops in combat. At the time, light-attack planes were seen as a potential replacement for at least some A-10s, which McCain has long championed.

However, the service, which once said it would retire all 283 snub-nose “Warthogs” to save an estimated $4.2 billion, now plans to keep them because of their utility in the fight against the Islamic State. McCain said in a recent report titled “Restoring American Power” that the Air Force should not only keep its A-10s but also buy 300 “low-cost, light-attack fighters that would require minimal work to develop.” The planes could carry out counterterrorism operations, perform close-air support and help to season pilots as the Air Force addresses its pilot shortfall, the report said.

The shortfall has become an increasing problem as pilots leave the military at a rate that Goldfein and then-Air Force Secretary Deborah James declared a crisis last summer. Data released to The Washington Post showed there were about 723 fighter pilot vacancies in the service among 3,495 jobs, leaving 21 percent unfilled.

The Air Force has attributed the shortage to recruiting by the commercial airline industry; frequent deployments keeping pilots away from their families; and a reduction in stateside training amid budget constraints. It says it sees the new light-attack plane as an inexpensive way to get entry-level military pilots into planes as quickly as possible.

“When they end their commitment at the end of 10 years, we’re losing a lot of them to the airlines,” said an Air Force official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive personnel matter. “Just to keep up … you have to match that exit every year in the production and seasoning of pilots. You’ve got to have cockpits for those pilots to go to to get that experience and seasoning after you do initial training.”

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[hatcity]

A-10's are all they need.

[Brocky]

The good ole Warthog!!

[HeavyGunner]

1 hour ago, hatcity said:

A-10's are all they need.

 

1 hour ago, Brocky said:

The good ole Warthog!!

I loved watching the pilots practice their touch and go's at Gowen AFB. They don't look it but are far more nimble than one would suspect. 

[kscarbel2]

Air Force to buy foreign ammunition for F-35 stealth multi-role fighter

Defense Blog  /  March 6, 2017

German defence and automotive group Rheinmetall said on Monday it had booked a $6.5 million U.S. Air Force contract to supply ammunition for the F-35 multi-role fighter, adding that further orders were likely to follow.

The order is of major strategic significance to Rheinmetall for two reasons. For one thing, the US Air Force is currently procuring the F-35 on a large scale, with 1,200 planes on order. Numerous other nations have opted for the new aircraft as well, among them Denmark, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Turkey and Japan. For another, the ammunition selected – the new 25mm x 137 Frangible Armour Piercing (FAP) – complements Rheinmetall’s existing array of high-performance aircraft ammunition, allowing the Düsseldorf, Germany-based Group to bring its full expertise to bear in the field of aircraft armament. This means that further major orders can be expected, especially since the first user nations are already ordering smaller amounts of this advanced ammunition for testing purposes.

The FAP round was specifically developed by Rheinmetall for, and in conjunction with, NATO air forces to provide the F-35 with superior lethality against modern Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs) at extreme slant ranges while still remaining deadly against enemy aircraft in air-to-air engagements. The 25mm x 137 FAP is a true all-purpose cartridge that is already in service with the F-35s of two NATO nations.

Manufacture of the ammunition for the US Air Force will take place at Rheinmetall Switzerland. Rheinmetall intends to have the ammunition of possible follow-up contracts assembled in the USA by Rheinmetall Day & Zimmermann Munitions (RDZM), a joint venture that operates out of Rosslyn, Virginia. American Rheinmetall Munitions and Day & Zimmermann established the joint venture in autumn 2016. Other potential customers will be supplied from locations belonging to Rheinmetall Waffe Munition Schweiz AG.

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[kscarbel2]

Heroic Hercules

Smithsonian Channel  /  July 31, 2017

Celebrate the Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules in times of war and peace as we revisit her history of daring efforts and detail how she continues to serve 70 countries on multiple missions.

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu-fjeyIWCM

[GA_Dave]

On 3/1/2017 at 10:12 AM, HeavyGunner said:

I loved watching the pilots practice their touch and go's at Gowen AFB. They don't look it but are far more nimble than one would suspect. 

I have never watched A-10's do touch and go's, but I would likely enjoy it.  Back in 1979-1981, I was serving in the US Army at Fort Hood, TX.  My MOS was 16P, Short Range Air Defense Artillery.  I was a gunner on a Chaparral Missile system.  My job was to shoot down enemy aircraft, however, the US was not at war at that time.  Still, we trained.  Since we were short of enemy aircraft to work with, we used what was available, friendly aircraft.  For those unfamiliar with Fort Hood, it is one of the largest Army bases in the US, with a very large "impact" area, used by all branches for live fire training, aircraft included.  Fort Hood was also home to the First Air Cavalry (Cobra attack helicopters).  It was rare to not see something flying over Fort Hood!  The variety of "targets" was spectacular - T-38's, F-4's, A-7's, A-10's, F-105's, F-14's, OV-1B's, OV-10's, UH-1's, AH-1's, CH-47's, OH-58's, C-130's and even an occasional C-5!

Using a dummy missile with a live IR seeker section, we were able to acquire and track targets as they flew over or went through their attack runs.  Of all the aircraft we saw, we all agreed that one presented the most challenge to us.  That one was the A-10.  While not as fast as some of the others, it was far more agile, zigzagging to the point of being almost impossible to get missile lock on it.  None of the others making attack runs were difficult for us to track.  I was always happy that those planes were on our side!

[carlotpilot]

All respect for military pilots. Watching a 747 doing touch & go`s from 50 yards off the runway is quite a charge also.

[kscarbel2]

B-2 stealth bomber makes emergency landing at Colorado Springs

KOAA News 5  /  October 23, 2018

COLORADO SPRINGS – The 21st Space Wing at Peterson Air Force Base confirmed to News 5 early Tuesday morning that a B-2 Stealth Bomber landed at the Colorado Springs Airport due to an in-flight emergency.

The Air Force refused to say what forced the $1.157 billion bomber to make the landing.

A maintenance crew is on the way to Colorado Springs from Missouri to check on the airplane to make sure it is still flightworthy for the trip back to Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg.

An Air Force spokesman would only say that the pilot determined it was safer to land here than continue on their training flight.

Depot maintenance responsibilities occur at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma.  Day-to-day maintenance responsibilities happen at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.

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[kscarbel2]

Introducing the X-32 Stealth Fighter (The Plane That Could Have Replaced the F-35)

David Majumdar, The National Interest  /  December 26, 2018

In October 26, 2001, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that Lockheed Martin’s X-35 had won the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) contest over Boeing’s X-32.

The win secured Lockheed’s future as the manufacturer for all of America’s fifth-generation fighter platforms. But Lockheed’s resultant F-35 has suffered myriad delay, technical glitches, unrecoverable technical shortfalls and massive cost overruns.

Already the largest ever defense program with an estimated price tag of $233 billion in 2001 for a total of 2,866 aircraft, the F-35 program is now estimated to cost more than $391 billion for 2,457 jets, according to the Government Accountability Office .

Moreover, while the short-takeoff vertical landing F-35B was originally projected to achieve initial operational capability with the U.S. Marines in 2010, it only reached that milestone in 2015—five years late. Meanwhile, the conventional F-35A and the F-35C carrier variant were both slated to achieve initial operational capability with Block 3 software in 2012—but that software block is now scheduled to be delivered for operational testing in 2017 at the earliest.

Would Boeing have done any better? Hard to say—the Joint Strike Fighter was always a technically challenging and extraordinarily ambitious program. It is likely that Boeing would have run into similar but different technical and budgetary problems. The fundamental issue with the Joint Strike Fighter was that is was always an overambitious program to replace multiple specialized types with one aircraft in the hope that it could perform every role equally well. The result is predictably a jack-of-all-trades but master of none.

One of the main reasons why Lockheed Martin’s design was selected over Boeing’s was because the X-32’s direct lift system—which uses engine thrust to lift the aircraft—is prone to pop stalls. That’s a phenomenon where hot exhaust gases are reingested into the engine causing a power loss. There were also questions as to whether the engine would be powerful enough to lift a fully operational F-32—the prototype had to have parts removed to ensure it would fly. It probably didn’t help Boeing’s case that it had to redesign the X-32 to meet the modified JSF requirements. An operational F-32 had a very different configuration from the X-32.

Even if Boeing managed to solve the airframe issue, they would have had to deal with the extremely complex sensor fusion software. The software was always going to be a challenge under the best of circumstances. The only edge Boeing had was that it had developed the Lockheed Martin F-22’s avionics package—but the JSF is much more complex.

Overall, it is very likely the Boeing would have run into the same sort of technical hiccups, cost overruns and delays as Lockheed did on the X-32. Lockheed mismanaged the F-35 program to an extent, but the Pentagon’s requirements for a all-in-one wonder plane is what caused the programs problems. With either company, the JSF program was almost certainly going to be late and over budget—it just a question of by what margin.

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[kscarbel2]

 

[bulldogboy]

The New Hampshire Air National Guard will be the first Air Guard unit in the country to receive the new KC-46A “Pegasus” air refueling tanker. The planes, a military version of the Boeing 757, will arrive at Pease ANGB in Newington, NH later this year. They will replace the current KC-135 tankers which the NHANG has been flying for over 40 years. I was a NHANG firefighter in the early 1970s.

Edited February 20, 2019 by bulldogboy

[mowerman]

Excellent thanks...bob