Air Force seeks new tanker (KC-135 Replacement?)

3/3/2006 - WASHINGTON (AFPN) -- The Air Force wants a new refueler aircraft, something commercially available now, which can be modified to replace the existing KC-135 Stratotanker fleet.

That testimony came from Air Force leaders associated with the tanker replacement program, Feb. 28 in front of the House Armed Services Committee subcommittee on projection forces.

Lt. Gen. Donald Hoffman, the military deputy for Air Force acquisition, told congressional members that his first choice would be to replace the service's fleet of aging KC-135s with a new airplane.

"It should be a new aircraft, a commercial derivative, and I think we ought to buy one kind," he said. "The first 100 (should) all look the same."

The general said he has no opinion on who should manufacture the plane, only that the new aircraft be the same as each other in both size and design.

General Hoffman told congressional members his second choice for recapitalizing the tanker fleet would be to modernize the current KC-135 fleet, which involves converting existing KC-135E models to KC-135R models.

But one problem with modernizing aircraft already owned by the Air Force is the rate at which those planes can be converted. General Hoffman said the Air Force can afford to convert about 15 aircraft a year to the R model. At that rate, the Air Force would be modernizing those aircraft for some 40 years. At the end of that cycle, some of the aircraft coming out of the modernization process would be nearly 80 years old.

Another problem with modernizing KC-135E aircraft is that even with the work that goes into converting them to KC-135Rs, there are still structural problems not addressed and some capabilities lacking.

Various estimates of the lifespan of the KC-135 project the retire date out as late as 2040, but as the aircraft get older, the Air Force discovers more things wrong with the aircraft. That decreases the projected lifespan of the "Eisenhower-era" tankers, many of which were built in the late 1950s to early 1960s.

"These airplanes continue to get older, and as they get older we continue to find things on them, (so) their time of usefulness will move closer to us," said Lt. Gen. Christopher Kelly, Air Mobility Command vice commander. "These particular airplanes, although they provide us with a good deal of service, are not modern airplanes and they do not give us the capability we would want to have in modern airplanes."

As the aircraft has no defensive capabilities, its limitations make it difficult to use in the desert, General Kelly said. Additionally, the Air Force would like to use its tanker fleet for work other than refueling, such as moving passengers and cargo. The Air Force would also like to offer both boom and drogue refueling capability with its primary tanker fleet, something the KC-135 can not now do.

"We would like to address those issues in a new acquisition if we were allowed to do that," General Kelly said. "From an operational point of view, the increased capability you'd get from a modern airplane with floors, doors, defensive systems, the ability to refuel itself and the ability to provide a drogue refueling and a boom refueling to receivers, would be a better investment than just re-engining the E models."

Replace it with anything, so long as it's a Boeing.

Not so fast-- there needs to be competitive bidding free of corrupt influences. Before the corruption scandal blew the first Boeing tanker deal, the AF wanted to pay 7 billion dollars more for leasing the Boeing tankers than it would have cost to buy them outright.

http://www.afa.org/magazine/sept2005/0905tanker.asp

'The tanker lease exploded in 2004, when Darleen A. Druyun, the senior civilian acquisition official for the Air Force, admitted to unfairly favoring the Boeing company for USAF contracts. Druyun had negotiated an early version of the lease agreement with Boeing. She left the Air Force well before the conclusion of the final deal, whose terms were much more advantageous to the Air Force. Druyun had retired and gone to work for Boeing at twice her government salary.

After the Druyun revelations, McCain said he refused to believe that the kind of corruption perpetrated by her could be the work of an individual, “acting alone.” McCain persuaded Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat, to join him in demanding the IG inquiry on who in the Pentagon was “accountable” for the unraveling of the tanker lease.

McCain Complains

McCain also complained that the lease was unnecessary because the KC-135s, despite being 40 years old, could, according to various reports, last decades longer, and because the lease would have cost up to $7 billion more than an outright purchase of the aircraft.

The IG reported that Aldridge, Wynne, Roche, Sambur, and of course Druyun were accountable for the “inappropriate” lease, but that, given the confusion over which laws to follow, they were not “culpable” for their actions. (See “Washington Watch: IG Calls Four ‘Accountable’ for Tanker Deal,” August, p. 8.) Also weighing in the officials’ favor was the fact that the lease had the express support and backing of three of the four Congressional committees overseeing defense spending, as well as the White House.

The lease agreement would have been signed, and Boeing would have built and supplied 100 of the tankers, but Druyun’s revelations in court caused Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to order a “pause” in the awarding of the contract until various investigations could assess the propriety of the deal. The June IG report was the last of several inquiries launched by Rumsfeld and the Air Force itself.

The delivery of the IG report seemed to mark a turning point in the debate over tankers. McCain, who long maintained that no new tankers were needed, or that merely upgrading the oldest ones with new engines would satisfy requirements, asserted in the June hearing that mistakes were made “in zeal to acquire this new tanker, which I think all of us agree is necessary.” The comment seemed to indicate that McCain will no longer oppose the pursuit of a replacement for the KC-135.'

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