The U.S. Air Force is moving ahead with developing a replacement for its Air Force EC-130H Compass Call electronic-attack aircraft now that Congress has provided funding through the recently enacted fiscal year 2017 omnibus appropriations act, a service official said May 15.
The legislation, which President Donald Trump signed into law earlier this month, contains $103 million to launch the program. As a result, the Air Force has “initiated the contract actions” to start the effort, said Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, military deputy in the Air Force acquisition office. 
“We’re off and running,” Bunch told reporters at the Pentagon. “We were pretty well locked and loaded and ready to go as soon as we’d get an approps bill.”
L3 Technologies [LLL] will be the lead systems integrator for the new aircraft, similar to its role on Compass Call. It will be charged with picking a new airframe and migrating mission equipment from the old airframe to the new one.
“They will now go out and collect information on various commercial alternatives to do a competition for which platform they would then select,” Bunch said. “We will get a report to analyze and look at that and make sure we understand what they’re doing.”
Bunch defended the Air Force’s decision not to hold an open competition for the systems integrator, saying L3 is uniquely qualified for the job due to its Compass Call experience.
The Air Force plans to buy 10 new aircraft to replace 14 Compass Calls. Compass Call, which achieved an initial operational capability in 1983, disrupts enemy command-and-control communications.
Turning to another aviation topic, Bunch said the Air Force has not yet decided whether to set up a light-attack aircraft program. The Air Force has invited industry to demonstrate its light-attack offerings in an experiment this summer at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The Air Force wants to get a better understanding of how such planes perform and how it would operate them.
“What we’re trying to do is get a better market sense, not a glossy brochure,” Bunch said. “Show us what the art of the possible is so that we can get an understanding of where is industry in that development, what technologies are out there and how ready would they be to manufacture something if we wanted to.”
Although the Air Force has not revealed which companies will be involved in the experiment, also known as the Capability Assessment of Non-Developmental Light Attack Platforms, or OA-X, Sierra Nevada Corp. announced last week that it will join Embraer Defense & Security in participating with the A-29 Super Tucano.