Boeing
has announced that F-15E1, the company’s F-15 Silent Eagle flight demonstrator aircraft, successfully completed its maiden flight test on July 8 from Lambert airport in St. Louis. During the 80-minute, Boeing F-15 chief test pilot Dan Draeger opened and closed the aircraft’s left-side conformal weapons bay, which held an instrumented AIM-120 test missile. The missile was not launched. ‘This flawless flight allows us to move into the next phase. In the next couple of weeks, we will ferry F-15E1 to the test range and launch an AIM-120,” said Brad Jones, Boeing’s director for F-15 development programs. The Silent Eagle design incorporates features to reduce the F-15’s radar cross section, along with the CWBs for air-to-air and air-to-ground munitions, and canted tail fins. Boeing says it is pursuing this variant for the international market.
A provision in the fiscal 2025 defense policy bill will require the Defense Department to include the military occupational specialty of service members who die by suicide in its annual report on suicide deaths, though it remains to be seen how much data the department will actually disclose.