This summer, the U.S. may finalize an acquisition strategy for a “gapfiller” tanker to fill a five-year hiatus between the delivery of the 179th and final Boeing [BA] KC-46A Pegasus and the fielding of the first Next Generation Air-Refueling System (NGAS).
Boeing and Airbus are in the running for that gapfiller tanker–Airbus with an A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport.
Last October, Lockheed Martin said it had chosen not to respond to an Air Force Request for Information (RFI) on the gapfiller tanker and that the company was moving the team for its proposed LMXT tanker “to new opportunities and priority programs within Lockheed Martin, including development of aerial refueling solutions” to support NGAS.
A year ago, the Air Force ended the KC-Y program for buying 150 commercial tankers as a bridge to NGAS–formerly known as KC-Z (Defense Daily, March 7). The Air Force said last spring that it planned instead to move ahead on up to 75 gapfiller tankers.
The KC-46A fleet and possible future tankers would replace more than 400 Boeing KC-135Rs and KC-10s in the coming decades.
“The main thrust of our [tanker] approach has been we want to get to NGAS in the quickest reasonable time frame because we see an increasingly contested environment in the Indo-Pacific, and we acknowledge that we have to be more and more capable in refueling capabilities in contested areas, which is not something we typically we do today, ” Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter told reporters at the McAleese & Associates defense programs conference in Washington, D.C.
As the Air Force fields the remaining KC-46As with various fixes, including the Remote Vision System 2.0, the service is facing “this period of when the current KC-46 contract completes and when we get to NGAS–some period of ‘five-ish’ years that we anticipate potentially,” Hunter said. “We have been talking to industry about how we cover that period. Because it’s a short period that will start in 2028, you have to have a pretty mature solution…You can’t start with a ‘clean sheet’ and have an airplane that will field in the later 2020s.”
After last fall’s gapfiller RFI, “we got meritorious responses from Boeing and Airbus, and we’ve been talking to them to clarify what those offerings look like and to evaluate them against our need base and our requirements,” he said. “We’re looking this summer to make a final decision based on the information we receive from industry on our acquisition strategy.”