The Air Force’s Fiscal 2012 spending plan doesn’t have any money in it for buying kits to perform a service life-extension program on some of the service’s F-16 fighters, but does provide $25 million for studies of a “potential SLEP,” and “defining what it would mean,” said USAF budget director Maj. Gen. Alfred Flowers in a Pentagon briefing. Flowers also said that if USAF must operate under a continuing resolution for Fiscal 2011, it doesn’t have the authority to launch a program to equip its F-15s with advanced radars. “We are worried” about that, Flowers said, because without the new radars, “we are at risk of having to ground some aircraft in the future.”
The Air Force and Boeing agreed to a nearly $2.4 billion contract for a new lot of KC-46 aerial tankers on Nov. 21. The deal, announced by the Pentagon, is for 15 new aircraft in Lot 11 at a cost of $2.389 billion—some $159 million per tail.