South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Air Force accepts flawed tankers in $44B program
The U.S. Air Force has accepted the first delivery of Boeing’s long-delayed aerial refueling tanker despite flaws that remain to be fixed, the service said Thursday.
The first eight of 179 planned KC-46 aerial tankers in the $44 billion program will be accepted from now through February. That’s more than two years late — and it may take as long as four more years to upgrade the troubled camera system used in refueling operations.
The Air Force is withholding as much as $28 million from the final payment on each aircraft as a financial hook to ensure Boeing makes the necessary improvements.
“We have identified, and Boeing has agreed to fix at its expense, deficiencies discovered in developmental testing of the remote vision system,” Capt. Hope Cronin, an Air Force spokeswoman, said in a statement.
The Pentagon’s approval of the Air Force’s plan to accept the flawed planes was caught up in turmoil at the top of the Defense Department. The decision was waiting on the desk of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis when he announced his plan to resign by the end of February.
President Donald Trump ordered him to clear out before Jan. 1. Mattis had previously chafed at accepting the planes with deficiencies. In November 2017 he sent a sticky note to his chief of staff saying that he was “unwilling (totally)” to accept deficient tankers.
Instead, the tanker decision was made by Ellen Lord, the undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, because acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, has recused himself from decisions on the company’s projects.
Once the first four aircraft are delivered to McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas, possibly by the end of this month, the tanker program will move into operational combat testing that’s expected to last until about June. Those tests will determine whether the aircraft is effective for combat and can be maintained. A second batch of four planes will be delivered next month to Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma to begin flight and ground crew training, Cronin said.
Leanne Caret, chief executive of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said in a statement that the tanker is a “proven, safe, multi-mission aircraft that will transform aerial refueling and mobility operations for decades to come.”
Boeing is under contract for 52 of the tankers, which are built on the airframe of the company’s 767 passenger plane.
Members of Congress are likely to ask questions about the decision to accept the aircraft with the flaws. But Air Force officials said that taking them with a plan for fixes to be made at Boeing’s expense will allow crews to train rather than have the planes sit unused.
“The Air Force has mechanisms in place to ensure Boeing meets its contractual obligations while we continue with” the combat testing, Cronin said.
The Defense Department is “in complete agreement” with the Air Force plan to accept delivery of the tanker, according to Lt. Col. Mike Andrews, a Pentagon spokesman.
The tanker’s 59-foot extended refueling boom is guided with a joystick by an airman using a system of seven cameras. But shadows or the glare of the sun can hamper the view in rare instances, the Air Force said.