Five aircraft from AFMC will be on static display on Boeing Plaza, led by the B-52 Bomber and C-17 Globemaster, EAA confirmed Thursday.

EAA’s annual fly-in convention is scheduled for July 22-28 at Wittman Regional Airport (KOSH) in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

• READ MORE: Flying In to AirVenture: A Carefully Orchestrated Cacophony of Chaos

B-52H Bomber Stratofortress

The B-52H has been part of the Air Force arsenal since 1952. Designed as a strategic long-range bomber, it can carry up to 70,000 pounds of ordinance. It was built to carry nuclear weapons then later modified for conventional ordinance.

It bomber has been used extensively in major military campaigns since the 1950s. This particular aircraft is based at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

C-17 Globemaster III

The C-17 is one of the most prevalent large cargo airplanes in the world, capable of airlifting hundreds of troops as well as heavy equipment. Often utilized for humanitarian relief missions, the aircraft has a range of nearly 3,000 miles.

F-15EX Eagle II

The F-15EX is a variant of the F-15E Strike Eagle with an updated avionics package. The fighter is a refined version of the F-15E, sporting a revised wing structure that increased the aircraft’s service life by 20,000 hours.

• READ MORE: Oshkosh 2024 Notice Outlines Changes for Pilots Flying to AirVenture

Beechcraft C-12 Huron

The C-12 is the military designation for a series of twin-prop aircraft based on the Beechcraft 1900 and Super King Air. The C-12 is used for embassy support, light cargo transport, and medical evacuation. 

X-40 Space Maneuver Vehicle

The X-40 is an unmanned, unpowered glide test vehicle created as a test platform for the X-37 Future-X reusable launch vehicle. It was designed by Boeing then delivered to NASA, which modified it to conduct further testing.

The X-40 will be showcased along with a B-52 munitions display inside a tent adjoining Boeing Plaza. Accompanying the aircraft will be a large number of Air Force personnel on hand to answer questions about their missions.

In addition, on July 27 the AFMC will also be featured during an evening program, focusing on test pilot school and the impact on global aviation, at the Theater in the Woods. 

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The event marked the first successful demonstration of the technology known as MagNav on a Department of Defense aircraft, the Air Force said. The technology is meant as a backup in case GPS navigation is disrupted by jamming or other countermeasures.

For the demonstration, members of the AIA MagNav team, with personnel from MIT, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Air Force Research Laboratory Sensors Directorate and, the Air Force Institute of Technology Autonomy and Navigation Center flew three sorties in the C-17 to Edwards Air Force Base in California during an exercise in May called “Golden Phoenix.”

To aid navigation, the teams used a neural network architecture that tracks the aircraft’s position based on a magnetic map while removing magnetic noise from the aircraft. The network had to be “trained” during flight using machine learning and artificial intelligence. The 60th Air Mobility Wing provided the aircraft used to assemble and train the MagNav prototype.

“Every pilot fears single points of failure,” said Maj. Kyle McAlpin, the AIA MagNav liaison. “Our strategy documents lament the DOD’s overreliance on GPS, a single point of failure in our ability to navigate precisely. The next fight demands unassailable positioning and navigation. We can achieve that by augmenting GPS with alternatives like celestial navigation, signals of opportunity, visual navigation, and magnetic navigation. 

“This week, we took an important step towards making one of those modalities a reality by transitioning MagNav from the minds of MIT and MIT Lincoln Laboratory onto an operational aircraft, blazing the trail for our sister services and expansion to new platforms.”

The Air Force said the collaboration between AIA, MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and other partners “paves the way for further innovation in navigation technologies, benefiting not only the Air Force but also the broader aviation community.”

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DARPA’s Liberty Lifter concept is a long-range X-plane capable of seaborne strategic and tactical lift operations with the ability to take off in turbulent ocean water. It will be affordable, made with low-cost, lightweight materials. If all goes as planned, the Liberty Lifter will perform its first flight in about five years.

While pushing airborne troops and gear onto foreign shores is hardly a novel concept, DARPA’s Liberty Lifter program aims to use new technology to expedite long-range logistics. The idea has been in the works internally at the agency for the past five years, according to Dr. Alexander Walan, a program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office.

It began with a question, Walan told FLYING. “Could we build a 100-knot ship to move things quicker across the Pacific? And the answer came back that, yes, you could probably build a ship that went 100 knots, but for a bunch of technical reasons, it’d be very limited in the sea state, and the weather it could operate in.”

To go fast, you would need to get out of the water. To be efficient, you would need to fly close to the surface. The Liberty Lifter aims to harness the efficiency of a large ship with the speed of an airplane, he said.

Distributed Propulsion

The idea of flying at low altitude, particularly in times of heightened threats, is not a new one.

“During the Cold War, NATO pilots trained to go really low to avoid radar,” Walan said. “Flying low definitely has survivability benefits,” he said, adding that traditional weapons systems aren’t designed to engage at that altitude.

Integral to its early conceptual design is the aircraft’s 10 engines located on the trailing edge of the wings. The design is deliberate, and meant to test a relatively new aerospace technology: distributed propulsion. The engines pull air over the wing, providing thrust that aids lift and reduces rotation speed and takeoff distance.

Locating the engines on the trailing edge also keeps them out of the sea and salt spray, Walan said.

Catamaran Stability

Conceptual art of the Liberty Lifter aircraft looks similar to the twin-fuselage Stratolaunch’s Roc, the world’s largest airplane by wingspan.

• READ MORE: Sensor Malfunction Shortens Stratolaunch’s Sixth Mission

“The art we’ve released is from our conceptual design activities,” Walan said. “As we go through our source selection this summer, we will pick contractors to execute the program,” and the design could change, he added.

“There’s a reason we settled on it in our early stage,” he explained.”The two hulls act a lot like a catamaran in sailing,” which provides stability with side waves and side motions. The twin hulls also help solve the common challenge found in a lot of air lifters of running out of floor space before running out of weight.

“A lot of times when you’re carrying pallets, or certainly when you’re carrying people, you run out of floor space first. So the nice thing about the two hulls,  you get a lot of floor space and a lot of volume, so there’s potential operational benefits to just having more floor space available for the same weight,” Walan said.

Adding Capability

The Liberty Lifter could also save precious space at airports. Military airlift operations are often limited by ramp space and potential threats on the ground.

“One of the things we wanted to do is, if we’re adding a new capability, we want to be able to basically not try to pick up additional ramp space that’s already limited,” Walan said. “We envision this aircraft being able to go to a port and unload with cranes, but also be able to get up very close to beaches,” he said. 

“What can we do to add capability without adding to the traffic jam?”

Much like current tactical and strategic airlifters, such as Lockheed Martin’s C-130 Hercules, the McDonnell Douglas/Boeing C-17, and Lockheed’s C-5 Galaxies, the Liberty Lifter could transport cargo and troops as well as combat vehicles.

“One of the things we want to do is actually deliver combat vehicles at the point of need,” Walan said. “Those could be amphibious vehicles, those could be small unmanned surface vessels, unmanned underwater vessels, as well as logistics, cargo, bulk cargo, those kinds of things.”

The new aircraft could also have commercial applications.

“At the end of the day, when we fly the vehicle, we want to demonstrate this operational capability of bringing heavy loads in long range, right to the point of need,” Walan said. “But we’re also looking at incorporating some of these new technologies like distributed propulsion, that hasn’t been proven at large scale. That’s a risk DARPA is willing to take.”

DARPA also wants the price of the Liberty Lifter to come in at half to a third of the cost of a similarly sized aircraft. To meet the goal, the agency will make conscious design choices that use cheaper materials and require less labor to manufacture, he said.

“That’s riskier, because you’re trying to do things new and differently,” Walan said. “We’re trying to use the best of the high-speed maritime technology as well as some low-cost aircraft manufacturing approaches.”

DARPA is currently evaluating proposals, and anticipates having a contract in place in the fall, around October, Walan said. 

“We will end the first year kind of refining the preliminary design,” before going into a more extensive, detailed design, he said. “We hope to fly within four and a half to five years, all told. So it’ll be a relatively fast-paced program.”

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The Air Force’s Office of Special Investigation (OSI) launched the probe into the August 16, 2021, flight from Hamid Karzai International Airport (OAKB) in Kabul after it landed at Al Udeid Air Base (OTBH) in Qatar and human remains were found in the aircraft’s wheel well.

In the final days of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, the C-17 landed at the airport with cargo meant for evacuation efforts, but had to depart before unloading it after hundreds of civilians descended upon the aircraft on the runway. “Faced with a rapidly deteriorating security situation around the aircraft, the C-17 crew decided to depart the airfield as quickly as possible,” the Air Force said at the time, Military.com reported.

Video of the C-17 leaving amid the chaos showed civilians falling from the aircraft after it became airborne, and became fodder for criticism for how the evacuation was conducted, an expert in Middle East political change told the news outlet. 

“It’s very unfortunate that it ended up looking the way that it did, because critics of the war were able to seize upon the image,” Jo-Anne Hart, a senior fellow in international and public affairs at Brown College, told Military.com. 

• READ MORE: ‘Thunderstorm of the Worst Case’

“This was a tragic event and our hearts go out to the families of the deceased,” Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said in a statement Monday following the release of the OSI report.

“As this incident occurred during an unprecedented evacuation where resources were constrained to on-going security and evacuation activities, OSI was asked to conduct an inquiry to determine the facts surrounding the loss of life,” Stefanek said. 

The incident was reviewed by Staff Judge Advocate offices of both Air Mobility Command and U.S. Central Command, and both concurred that the C-17 crew were in compliance with rules of engagement specific to armed conflict.

“The aircrew’s operational leadership also reviewed the details of the mission and concluded that the aircrew had acted appropriately and exercised sound judgment in their decision to get airborne as quickly as possible when faced with an unprecedented and rapidly deteriorating security situation,” Stefanek said.

“The aircrew’s airmanship and quick thinking ensured the safety of the crew and their aircraft,” she added.

During the Noncombatant Evacuation Operations from Afghanistan, military flights evacuated an estimated 124,000 people from Afghanistan.

On August 15, 2021, the Air Force airlift mission broke a record by packing  823 people into a C-17 during an evacuation flight from Kabul, Air Force Magazine reported. The cargo airplanes typically top out at around 300 passengers, it said.

The post Air Force Probe Clears C-17 Crew Following Civilian Deaths During Afghanistan Evacuation appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The new pilot program—dubbed the Mission Execution Excellence Program (MEEP)—targets the largest fuel guzzler in the fleet: the C-17 Globemaster III. The test program will roll out at Joint Base Charleston in South Carolina and Travis Air Base in California and run through the end of the year.

• READ MORE: Could Future DOD Purchases Accelerate the SAF Market?

The news comes as U.S. defense officials are increasingly integrating climate change considerations into operations and planning, a priority underscored by the Department of Defense’s (DOD) climate adaptation plan released in October. Initiatives span the gamut. Thursday, for example, the DOD—the largest energy user in the U.S. federal government—along with the General Service Administration, released a request for information for market capabilities for supplying the government carbon pollution-free electricity.

The Air Force is feeling the pressure to find efficiencies. When it comes to DOD fuel consumption, the Air Force and the C-17 are among the top consumers, according to the service. In 2018, for example, the Air Force was using about 2 billion gallons of aviation fuel each year,  a staggering amount that claimed about 81 percent of the service’s total energy budget. 

“We’ve met with a number of commercial airlines and freight and transport companies to see how they operate in the most efficient and effective way possible using 21st century tools,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Air Force Operational Energy Roberto Guerrero said in a statement.

According to Air Force officials, initial estimates indicate the strategies would amp mission effectiveness per gallon of fuel by 3 percent and save up to $80 million in fuel costs.

“There are a lot of opportunities to support airmen in flying more efficiently, like software that helps airmen fuel plan more easily or flying techniques that pilots can implement, maintenance practices to improve engine performance and ways to improve load plans,” Guerrero said. “Many of these are low-hanging fruit that we simply need to fund and incentivize.” 

New Program Strategies

“MEEP will mainly work with pilots and operations planners, as well as maintainers and logisticians, and will leverage airman innovation to integrate improved techniques and best practices into their day-to-day operations,” the Air Force said.

The MEEP strategies include:

• Precision fuel planning, such as decreasing excess fuel tankering during planned flights when possible. 
• Reducing the number of engines running during taxi to the minimum required for safe operation when possible. 
• Limiting the use of auxiliary power units during ground operations and utilizing more efficient ground power equipment when possible.
• Minimizing the time between engine start and takeoff by reducing the number of engines running or starting the engines simultaneously when possible. 
• Employing continuous descent operations in a low-drag configuration, with minimal engine thrust when possible. 
• Flying at optimal cruise altitudes when possible. 

How the Airlines are Doing It

The Air Force program strategies mirror those deployed by commercial airlines, which increasingly see climate change as a business risk.

American Airlines, for example, is employing a laundry list of techniques and strategies to curb fuel use and reduce emissions. One strategy the airline has found to be successful is to increase the use of single-engine taxi operations.

“By relying on just one aircraft engine to taxi to the gate after landing when possible, we lowered emissions by 18,700 metric tons of CO2 in 2020,” the airline said in a recent environmental report.

• READ MORE: More Signs Aviation Is Serious About Cleaner Fuel

“We know the most impactful thing we can do today is use less fuel as we take our customers on their journeys,” American Airlines chairman and CEO Doug Parker said in the environmental report. 

American has modernized its fleet, buying 600 new airplanes since 2013, which it says increased its fuel burn per available seat mile by 8.5 percent. Filling airplanes and operating close to the aircraft’s maximum passenger capacity also increases fuel efficiency, according to the airline. Other strategies included reducing weight in other areas, such as installing lighter seats, eschewing in-flight entertainment systems, and using lighter paint. Those weight-reducing initiatives saved the airline 12.4 million gallons of aviation fuel, it said.

Earlier last year, American also began optimizing weather reports with specialized software to provide crews optimal flight altitudes and speeds, a move the airline saved 1.1 million gallons of fuel in 2020 alone.

Air Force officials say following the conclusion of the MEEP pilot program in December, the program will be expanded to other bases and aircraft.

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U.S. military cargo aircraft are one step closer to delivering long-range strike weapons en masse, according to an announcement by the U.S. Air Force.

The announcement comes after a demonstration Wednesday of a new Air Force rapid development program which aims to turn mobility aircraft into bombers.

The program, called Rapid Dragon, involved Boeing C-17 Globemaster III and Lockheed EC-130 test-dropping munition pallets over White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The pallets contained surrogate Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM-ERs).

Rapid Dragon, which is led by the Air Force Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation (SDPE) office, seeks to offer commanders a wider range of air strike capabilities.

“These Rapid Dragon deployments represent the first end-to-end demonstration of a palletized strike mission, from rolling missile pallets onto an aircraft to in-flight missile release,” said Scott Callaway, Lockheed Martin’s director of advanced strike programs. “They are a big step toward showing the feasibility of the palletized munitions concept and the ability of mobility aircraft to augment the strike capacity of tactical fighters and strategic bombers.”

“Once stabilized by parachutes, the pallets released surrogate missiles in quick succession, each aerodynamically identical to a JASSM-ER,” Lockheed Martin said in a statement. During the flights, a ground crew transmitted new targets. “The ability to retarget missiles while the aircraft is airborne provides combatant commanders the flexibility to respond to changes in a dynamic operational environment,” it said.

Compatibility

Key to the program’s utility, said program officials, is the compatibility it would have with standard airlift inventory systems that require no aircraft modifications.

“Rapid Dragon could ultimately lead to a roll-on, roll-off system that transforms mobility aircraft into lethal strike platforms that augment the strike capacity of tactical fighters and strategic bombers,” said Dean Evans, palletized munitions experimentation program manager with SDPE, earlier this summer.

It’s a utility that could be expanded.

“The retargeting methodology used is transferable to other strike and cargo platforms, potentially increasing lethality of all JASSM-capable strike assets,” Evans said. “These new capabilities can provide combatant commanders additional flexibility to prosecute targets en masse in the high-end fight, thus changing the adversary’s calculus in an increasingly complicated and dynamic near-peer conflict.”

What’s Next

The next step is deploying another surrogate JASSM-ER from an MC-130J, a test that is expected to occur in the next few months.

“This test missile will have deployable wings and tail fins,” Callaway said. “The goal is to show that a JASSM-ER can stabilize itself after a vertical pallet drop.”

By the end of the year, things get real with a live-fire of actual JASSM-ER from a Lockheed MC-130J, he said. A similar airdrop from a C-17 is planned in Spring 2022.

“These tests will inform potential design refinement and accelerate the maturation of these systems for further capability experimentation and rapid fielding,” Callaway said.

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