Ash Carter, who served as the 25th Secretary of Defense from 2015 to 2017, during the presidency of Barack Obama, died Oct. 24 at the age of 68. Carter served in national security roles and held numerous academic research, teaching, and leadership positions.
Lockheed Martin says it is still pitching its LMXT tanker to the Air Force amid a looming requirements announcement for the KC-Y tanker program. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has cast doubt on whether a KC-Y program would field a wholly new aircraft and has ...
The Air Force plans to complete testing of a full-scale blended wing body cargo/tanker aircraft within four years, according to the department’s new Climate Action Plan. The demonstrator could be a prototype for a future operational mobility aircraft or family of aircraft, and the plan ...
With an ambitious goal of being ready to fight inside the Pacific’s first island chain by August 2023, Air Mobility Command boss Gen. Mike Minihan laid out what he called his “Mobility Manifesto” at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber conference, highlighted by plans to move ...
The Advanced Battle Management System's best chance against failing is to create a czar for command, control, and communications who will have top-down support to enforce decisions, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters at AFA's Air, Space & Cyber Conference. He also discussed topics ...
The Air Force doesn’t want its new “collaborative combat aircraft” to be exclusively part of the Next Generation Air Dominance system but is looking at other air- and ground-based platforms to direct such uncrewed airplanes, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. ...
The KC-46 boom operators stopped talking and leaned in as Maryland Air National Guard F-16s approached on a refueling mission over upstate New York. The fighters were visible on a 1,080-pixel, black-and-white screen. The cockpit went quiet, too, and the pilot flipped to a visual ...
JOINT BASE MCGUIRE-DIX-LAKEHURST, N.J.—The KC-46 Pegasus tankers here all fly with the callsign "Pudgy" in honor of the second-highest-scoring American ace of World War II, Thomas B. McGuire. "Pudgy 01” and “Pudgy 02” arrived Nov. 9, 2021, as part of an elaborate welcoming ceremony. Pudgies ...
The Pentagon has put out a call for blended wing body aircraft concepts that could be applied to future military tanker and cargo aircraft as well as commercial aircraft, according to a solicitation posted by the Defense Innovation Unit. The Pentagon wants “concepts of design ...
The defense contractors vying for the Air Force’s “bridge tanker” program updated the status of their aerial refuelers, citing new capabilities aimed at automating the refueling process. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has repeatedly said the likelihood of a competition for the service’s “bridge tanker” ...
Two Active-duty squadrons joined wings of the Air National Guard. The 306th Fighter Squadron became an associate of New Jersey’s 177th Fighter Wing, which flies F-16s; and the 64th Air Refueling Squadron joined New Hampshire’s 157th Air Refueling Wing, which flies KC-46s.
The Air Force has pounded another nail into the coffin of a potential bridge tanker competition with the launch of the Advanced Aerial Refueling Family of Systems (AAR FoS) program. In a request for information by the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, the service ...