KC-46 Cleared For Refueling 70% Of Joint Air Fleet As Next Round Of Tanker Competition Looms

With 53 aircraft in service, Boeing’s
BA
KC-46 Pegasus tanker is now approved for supporting over two-thirds of the aircraft in the joint air fleet that are capable of receiving fuel in flight.

The tanker has passed 60 million pounds of fuel in testing and operational missions, including refueling fighters escorting Air Force One, the president’s plane, during the holidays.

All of the Air Force’s fighters, bombers and airlifters have successfully completed testing, and either have been or soon will be certified for relying on Pegasus to extend their range via aerial refueling.

The same is true of most of the tactical aircraft operated by the sea services, from the F/A-18 Super Hornet to the MV-22 Osprey to the F-35C Lightning II.

Thus, while the gestation of the Air Force’s next-generation tanker has been delayed by several years, it appears KC-46 is on the verge of meeting all expectations.

Some of those expectations, translated into what the service calls “key performance parameters,” are imposing.

For instance, KC-46 must provide onboard crews and passengers with protection against chemical/biological attack, and the potentially disabling effects of electromagnetic pulse.

The latter requirement, intended to enable operations in nuclear war, resulted in the plane’s fly-by-wire flight controls being supplemented with a mechanical system that can withstand loss of power.

That is not a feature found in the military fleets of most countries, even on combat aircraft.

What it underscores is that KC-46 was conceived to perform diverse missions in an array of combat environments for many years to come—probably to the end of the century.

Successfully demonstrating such capabilities today has become especially important to Boeing, a contributor to my think tank, because later this year the Air Force will release a solicitation for the next round of tanker competition.

Lockheed Martin
LMT
, another contributor to the think tank, has recently disclosed its intention to offer an evolved version of the larger Airbus Multirole Tanker Transport.

Whatever the virtues of a smaller versus a larger tanker might be—the planes have competed before—it is crucial to Boeing’s prospects that it enter the next round of competition with a product that has proven it can do all the things the Air Force wants.

At present, the company seems to be on a vector to meeting that goal.

A handful of residual issues, what the Air Force calls “deficiencies,” remain to be corrected, but these are all well on their way to resolution and the Air Force often identifies deficiencies on airframes that have been operating longer than KC-46.

The issue that has received the most attention is the Remote Vision System enabling an operator in the cockpit to position the fuel-delivery “boom” into receiving aircraft behind the tanker.

Once that happens, the system can transfer over a thousand gallons of fuel per minute, but it’s a demanding task in which precision is crucial.

Some features of the baseline vision system have not met Air Force expectations, so Boeing has devised a two-step solution that first enhances the existing system and then replaces it beginning in 2024 with a new system that the company calls RVS 2.0.

Both steps can probably be accomplished in the course of scheduled depot maintenance on the aircraft.

The fact the tanker has been used thousands of times to transfer fuel in advance of the upgrades suggests that the configuration of the existing system is not a show-stopper.

In fact, some of the concerns surrounding the existing system, such a sun glint and scraping of the receiving aircraft, occur using other tankers.

Nonetheless, Boeing has to enter the next round of competition with the vision system meeting Air Force expectations, because small differences bulk large when both offerors are proposing state-of-the-art products.

Although all of the Air Force’s 400+ aerial refuelers are derived from commercial transports, the service typically loads up the tanker versions with a raft of unique requirements that permit the planes to cope with any operational contingencies that might arise.

So, the tankers must be capable of refueling aircraft operated by multiple services and allies; they must be capable of carrying cargo and passengers; they must be able to conduct aeromedical evacuations; they must be survivable in hostile air space; and of course they must be net ready.

When you combine all those performance features, what looks externally like a vanilla version of the Boeing 767 becomes an unusually versatile and resilient airframe.

It has to be because one day the tanker might be called on to extend the reach of U.S. forces under harrowing circumstances.

The ability to provide aerial refueling virtually anywhere around the world is one of the enablers that makes the U.S. Air Force unique; the advent of information warfare has not made Air Force expectations for its tankers any less imposing.

Quite the opposite.

Boeing repeatedly demonstrated it could meet those expectations in the past, so KC-46 is, in a sense, just the continuation of a story that began many decades ago

But the Air Force’s tanker modernization program is big business—worth over $100 billion across the service life of three iterations—so being ready for the next round of competition is a top priority for the company.

You might call it as “must-win” for Boeing’s military aircraft unit.