Acting AF chief discusses jet’s woes

The Boeing KC-46 tanker, one of the Air Force’s costliest programs at $43 billion, has been plagued by “critical deficiencies” that include the plane’s ability to refuel stealth aircraft without damaging them, according to a government report.

Deliveries of the jet are behind schedule. The Air Force twice stopped accepting the tanker after discovering debris that ranged from zip ties, electrical tape and washers to nuts and even tools.

Acting Air Force Secretary Matthew Donovan said 13 planes delivered so far had “some level” of foreign object debris “whether it comes to mere specks of dirt and that kind of thing, which are still problematic depending on where they’re at.”

“The tanker’s been frustrating,” Donovan said while visiting Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland recently, adding that the original delivery date for the first 18 planes was August 2017, “and so now here we are almost two years later and not close to those deliveries.

“So it has been problematic that even though the vendor themselves have taken chargebacks of … around $3 billion that they’ve had to absorb in cost … we still didn’t get the aircraft on time,” he added.

A Government Accountability Office report outlined deficiencies involving the fuel boom and the ability of the Air Force operator to get it into position. The fixes, it said, are expected to take three or four years.

In the meantime, the Air Force stopped accepting the KC-46 on two occasions after debris was found in the planes. That’s been resolved.

The problems have cost the Air Force more than $300 million and forced it to limit some refueling operations. It also has withheld $360 million in payments to Boeing.

The issues outlined in the GAO report aren’t the only ones facing Donovan, 60, who became the top civilian Air Force leader in June, around the time the agency handed down the tanker’s latest unsatisfactory report card.

The other problems are 50 percent mission-capable rates for the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and plans to purchase the F-15EX fighter even as the Air Force procures dozens of F-35s each year. The Air Force’s proposal for the 2020 fiscal year budget calls for buying eight of those F-15s. Donovan waved off the mission-capable rate issue, saying the Air Force hasn’t failed to deliver planes for deployments that saw B-52 bombers and F-22 Raptors go overseas on short notice.

“They all showed up when they were supposed to show up,” he said.

Donovan observed basic training while at Lackland. The trip was a homecoming for Donovan, who began his military career here as a reluctant recruit 42 years ago.

The son of divorced parents who’d been in the Air Force during the Korean War, he signed up to get an education but quickly regretted the decision.

“The first time I had flown on an airplane in my life was when I got on the airplane to fly to basic training in San Antonio out of Manchester, N.H., on a Southwest flight, and so I was scared to death,” he said.

He had shoulder-length hair as a high school student. At Lackland, he was practically bald. Three weeks into basic, he went to his training instructor and said he’d made a mistake. The instructor told him to hang on.

Three weeks later, Donovan marched past the reviewing stand as an honor graduate. In

time he became an officer, graduated at the top of his undergraduate pilot training class and flew the F-15.

‘Global power’

Donovan these days is responsible for organizing, training, equipping and providing for the welfare of 685,000 active-duty, Guard, Reserve and civilian forces as well as their families, coming to the job after two years as undersecretary of the Air Force.

He’s commanded a fighter squadron, held flying and staff assignments at the wing, major command and joint and combined staff levels, and flew as an F-15C demonstration pilot. A retired colonel, Donovan logged more than 2,900 flight hours in fighter jets and served in Iraq. In 199798, he became an ardent advocate of an independent Space Force, writing about it at the Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies at Maxwell AFB, Ala.

“I like to think about what would the U.S. Air Force look like today if it was still under the Department of the Army and was the Army Air Forces,” Donovan said. “Well, we probably would be an extension of Army artillery, we’d be close-air support, those kinds of things. We wouldn’t be the global power that we are today.”

Space, however, is enormously expensive. While the 2019 Pentagon budget is $686 billion and will be higher next year, Congress earlier in the decade slapped caps on domestic and defense spending and could return to an era of fiscal austerity as the budget deficit increases.

Donovan dismissed the issue. “I think it’s unfortunate to snap right to cost,” he said. “As (former Defense) Secretary ( Jim) Mattis used to say quite often, the nation can afford survival. Our adversaries, or potential adversaries, especially China and Russia, have not been resting on their laurels, and they’ve been catching up rapidly with us, and so for us to maintain dominance in space as a new war-fighting domain — which it really is now — then it’s going to cost.”

New headaches

The KC-46 is replacing a fleet of aging tankers — the oldest of which has been in service more than 60 years.

The new tanker’s promise as a high-tech wonder has revealed the sort of headaches seen in other procurement programs. Problems have cropped up with the tanker’s remote refueling boom and its potential for damaging the stealth properties of aircraft.

In older tankers, the boom operator looks through a window in the rear of the plane, giving a bird’s-eye view of the refueling process. But the KC-46 uses a remote system in which the boom operator wears 3D goggles with images fed via cameras. Donovan said such systems have been used in some tankers for over 20 years, but one problem in the KC-46 is insufficient depth perception provided by the images. Those images also lighten and darken because of clouds or variations in topography.

“The deficiency we have out there on the remote vision system is that it is taking longer to refuel because it is taking longer for the boom operators to perform the job,” said Brig. Gen. John Newberry, the Air Force’s program executive officer for tankers. “And so it is unsatisfactory performance, but we have put mitigations in place to continue operations, and we’re doing that today.”

Donovan