In December, 2022, Leidos ($13.7B annual revenue fortune 500 company) was awarded a $334 million contract to assist the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in developing an air-breathing hypersonic system. The Expendable Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and Strike program, better known as Mayhem, will span a 51-month period of performance. The …
The F-35As have critical failures every 11 flight hours and airframe-only (excluding engines and systems) maintenance is 4.4 man-hours per flight hour. The US air force is trying to fly its F35s from 250-316 hours each year. This would mean 1100-1400 hours each year on airframe maintenance and more hours on engines and systems. Each …
The F-35 first flew in 2006. It entered service with the U.S. Marine Corps in July 2015, the U.S. Air Force in August 2016, and the U.S. Navy in February 2019. The F-35 fleet is the second largest in the Air Force inventory, after the F-16. As of April 2022, the American military had purchased …
The Aviationist site is claiming that there is a leaked photo of the secret backend of the B-21 Stealth Bomber. This had been kept secret to hide the design of the exhaust areas, which are made smoother to lower radar reflections. The B-21 Stealth bombers should have first test flights by the end of the …
In 2024, the US Air Force will select the vendor the sixth generation NGAD (Next Generation Air Dominance) fighter and the either GE or Pratt & Whitney for the ATEP engine (Adaptive Engine Transition Program). The Air Force last year awarded contracts worth nearly $1 billion each to aircraft manufacturers Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop …
The US Air Force has given the first look at the the Air Force’s Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile. This will be a hypersonic missile with a supersonic ramjet engine that is scheduled for deployment around 2027. Drawings of the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile are below. The scramjet propelled the missile at “a speed greater than …
The U.S. Air Force announced today the B-21 Raider has started engine runs as part of its ground test program at Northrop Grumman’s Palmdale, California, facility. Engine testing is an essential milestone for the program as the world’s first sixth-generation aircraft continues on the path to flight test. A first flight in the next few …
People compare the count of how many F-35s have been built versus how many China J-20 stealth have been built. There is a comparison of the annual production rate. However, a very important comparison is how many of them are fully available, fully usable and fully capable are they to perform their needed roles?
The US Air force fiscal 2024 budget includes nearly $50 million to start a program called Project Venom — or Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model — to help it experiment with and refine autonomous software loaded onto six F-16s. The Air Force wants to develop a fleet of at least 1,000 collaborative combat aircraft, …
The F22 has been operational for nearly 20 years, but the “greatest fighter ever” has only ever shot down the chinese spy balloon. The F22 reputation is from technical specifications and wargame combat. It was made operational in 2005 and was used in combat against ISIS in 2014. It has a good top speed (mach …
