A crew of Defense Department and Lockheed Martin personnel last week conducted the first joint acceptance flight for a C-5M transport that rolled off of the company’s aircraft modification line in Marietta, Ga., announced the company. The flight occurred on Oct. 17. “Today marks a significant milestone for our C-5 family,” said Greg Ulmer, Lockheed Martin’s C-5 program vice president, of the inaugural joint mission in the company’s Oct. 22 release. He added, “This is just one step of many we are implementing to increase the rate of C-5M deliveries to our warfighters.” Lockheed Martin expects that the joint acceptance flights will reduce total delivery time by two weeks to four weeks. C-5M flight acceptance is the final phase of the process to deliver the aircraft back to the Air Force. The service has plans to upgrade a total of 52 C-5s (one C-5A, 49 C-5Bs, and two C-5Cs) to the new Super Galaxy standard. Lockheed Martin on Oct. 18 inducted another C-5, a C-5B from Travis AFB, Calif., into the modification line, according to a posting at the company’s Flickr site. It’s the 18th C-5 overall so far to undergo the upgrade, when including the three aircraft modified for use in flight testing before the production line started in Marietta.
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.