Boeing [BA] has delivered the first new A-10 wing set in a second round of A-10 re-winging to follow the initial phase for 173 of the planes, the company said on May 25.
Boeing, Korean Aerospace Industries and other companies are teamed on the effort and delivered the first new, second round wing set for installation at Ogden Air Logistics Complex, Utah this month, Boeing said.
The first round of re-winging of 173 A-10s came under the 2007 A-10 Enhanced Wing Assembly Replacement program worth $1.1 billion. The company delivered the first wings under that contract in 2011 and the final set in 2018.
In 2019, Boeing won another contract potentially worth
$999 million to re-wing the remainder of the A-10 fleet (Defense Daily, Aug. 21, 2019). But the service now plans to maintain and modernize just 218 of the planes before divesting them by 2028. Boeing said on May 25 that it plans to provide 50 new wing sets in the second round.
The A-10 has been a target of proposed cuts by the Air Force before, including in 2014, when the service requested the retirement of the then-fleet of 334 planes to save $4.2 billion over five years–a proposal that Congress rejected.
“The A-10 wing program was previously a dry line, with tools and equipment housed in long-term storage,” Boeing said on May 25. “Boeing Global Services revived the tooling and activated the supply base within 12 months of contract award.”
Dan Grazier, a senior defense policy fellow at the Project on Government Oversight, is the author of a recent analysis on the A-10 that includes a March 31, 2022, briefing by Pam Lee, the A-10 system program manager at Hill AFB, Utah.
The briefing noted that 145 A-10s are non-deployable and that the Air Force has not funded a needed replacement for the A-10’s central interface control unit (CICU), which manages the A-10’s avionics, graphics, and communications (Defense Daily, May 2).
The Air Force “resourced A-10 to divest yet flew it like an enduring fleet, rapidly accelerating decline toward today’s hollowing fleet,” per one of Lee’s slides.