Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne told the House Armed Services Committee that canceling the alternate engine program for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was “a very tough call,” involving long-term reliability statistics and economics. He granted that the service needed an alternate engine for the F-16 fighter because of reliability problems, but he said that today’s engines are much more reliable. “The reliability argument began to eat into whether or not there would be an economic shortfall,” said Wynne. He added that if there were “an extra dollar,” an alternate engine would “be one place” it would be spent. Why? Two reasons, said Wynne: “We do worry about the downstream effects. … I don’t like to see our industrial base go to a single supplier.”
The Air Force’s nascent KC-Z program, aimed at developing a next-generation family of systems for aerial refueling, will look to launch its analysis-of-alternatives study in 2024, years earlier than originally planned. Originally, the analysis of alternatives for KC-Z was set for “maybe in the 2030s,” Paul Waugh, program executive officer…