Aircraft

The Air Force this week completed its initial round of adversary air contracts, awarding Advanced Tactical Advantage Co. a contract worth up to $92 million to provide live adversary air training to F-22 and F-35 pilots at Eglin Air Force Base, FL.

The Air Force and Lockheed Martin have begun negotiating a lower unit cost for the next batch of commoditized F-16 fighter jets they anticipate supplying through last month's novel foreign military sale contract to a new group of customers, sources tell Inside Defense.

The Air Force is refining its acquisition strategy for the Stand-in Attack Weapon -- an emerging guided missile intended for the F-35 fighter jet -- to place greater emphasis on digital engineering and open-systems architecture.

Boeing expects to be on contract for the first block of KC-46 modernization work by the first quarter of 2021 -- the first phase of a 10-year, $5.7 billion post-production contract the Air Force awarded the company last year.

The White House has sent the Senate Armed Services Committee a list of provisions in the fiscal year 2021 defense authorization bill it does not like, but chose to lead with one President Trump has said would make him veto the entire must-pass bill -- the re-naming of U.S. military bases that currently honor Confederate leaders.

The new head of Air Mobility Command said today that while she has seen progress in Boeing's proposed interim KC-46 Remote Vision System upgrade package, she needs more testing data and assurance that the near-term value the capability could bring to the warfighter outweighs the time it would take to upgrade existing tankers.

A new Defense Department inspector general report finds that the F-35 joint program office has a "nonfunctioning process" to determine whether damaged parts should be repaired or discarded -- an issue that has led to a reduction in available spare parts and disposal of hundreds of parts without DOD approval. 

The Next Generation Jammer-Mid Band program, the Navy and Marine Corps $8.7 billion maritime airborne electronic attack modernization effort, achieved an important developmental milestone this month when a prototype was flown for the first time on an EA-18G Growler, a key step for a project that suffered serious design setbacks three years ago.

The Air Force is slated to award Lockheed Martin a first-of-its-kind indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract tomorrow to sell foreign militaries commoditized F-16 fighter jets off the latest Block 70 production line.