Sierra Nevada Corp. is preparing to receive its first industrial passenger jet to be modified into the Air Force’s next “doomsday” planes — and readying for what it hopes will mark a brand new era for the mid-size defense contractor.
Brady Hauboldt, SNC’s vp of business development, told Defense News May 29 the primary of 5 Boeing 747-8s that can develop into the Survivable Airborne Operations Center, or SAOC, will arrive at its Dayton, Ohio, facility this summer.
Over the following dozen years, the SAOC will regularly replace the Air Force’s aging E-4B Nightwatch, or National Airborne Operations Center aircraft. If a nuclear war or other catastrophe were to occur that destroyed the military’s command-and-control centers on the bottom, the president would direct forces through an airborne E-4B or SAOC.
However the Air Force only has 4 E-4Bs, which have been flying because the Nineteen Seventies, they usually are near the tip of their service lives. The service announced in April it had awarded SNC a $13 billion contract to construct SAOC and replace the E-4B by July 2036.
The deal is the most important single contract SNC has received in its greater than six-decade history as a mission systems integration and aircraft modification company, Hauboldt said. The corporate hopes its work on SAOC will open opportunities to even larger contracts and major programs in the longer term.
SNC decided to shoot for larger growth lately, he said. The corporate ramped up its investment in digital engineering tools and latest infrastructure and facilities, standing up an Aviation Innovation and Technology Center in Dayton, Ohio, which incorporates large hangars where the 747s can be modified into SAOCs.
SNC’s first latest hangar in Dayton opened a 12 months and a half ago. The second can be done this summer, and three more hangars and other support facilities will follow.
Developmental engineering on SAOC will largely be based at SNC’s facility near Denver, Colorado, and other latest offices are being arrange in locations akin to Dallas, Texas. This can allow SNC to benefit from hiring pools in multiple locations across the country, as the corporate adds about 1,000 employees for this system, Hauboldt said.
“All of that investment within the digital tools, the staff and the facilities for SNC have put us able to tackle this type of a project, like SAOC,” he added.
Antennas, latest computers — and radiation shielding
Earlier in May, Reuters reported that SNC will buy five Boeing 747-8 planes from Korean Air to convert into flying operations centers, with the last scheduled for delivery in September 2025. Hauboldt told Defense News these five aircraft are all the corporate needs to complete the engineering and manufacturing development requirements of SAOC, but said SNC will buy more planes if the Air Force desires to further expand its fleet.
Hauboldt said SNC has inspected the planes, the oldest of which was delivered in 2015, and located Korean Air has kept them in excellent condition.
“They’ve been maintained in tip-top shape,” Haubold said.
SNC is using a totally digital process to design SAOC, he said, and the Air Force will own those digital models. Hauboldt said the digital models, together with the open systems architecture, will make it easier for the Air Force to upgrade the planes in the longer term.
The structural modifications to show the 747s into airborne command center will include installing communications antennas throughout the aircraft, a galley for long-haul flights, the mission systems where the crew will perform their jobs, and adding the wiring and infrastructure to support those systems, Hauboldt said.
But probably the most critical upgrades can be to harden the plane to face up to radiation and electromagnetic pulses it’d encounter from a nuclear blast. Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works will conduct this work as a subcontractor on this system, Hauboldt said, in addition to performing other work on SAOC.
Skunk Works “bring[s] plenty of expertise in integrating advanced capabilities on airframes — on this case, the radiation hardening,” Hauboldt said. “They’ve an experience base that SNC has less experience on, so we added them to the team.”
The planes will keep their General Electric-made GEnx-2B engines, he said, and Rolls-Royce will provide the aircraft’s auxiliary power systems. Collins Aerospace, which Hauboldt called a frontrunner within the defense industry on nuclear command, control and communications systems, can even help construct SAOC.
Along with being a more energizing air frame than the half-century old E-4Bs, Hauboldt said, the brand new SAOC will profit from having modern, user-friendly computers and other technologies installed, and the simple modification that comes from having an open architecture structure.
The Air Force was focused on keeping down the lifecycle costs to operate and sustain SAOC, Hauboldt said — particularly after the high maintenance cost of the E-4B.
So SNC tailored its proposal to deal with those concerns by utilizing open systems architecture and offering the Air Force a “robust” data rights package — something the Air Force has found difficult to acquire from contractors on other aircraft akin to the F-35.
Hauboldt acknowledged that might mean, in the future, that one other company could win the contract to sustain this system. But he said SNC is confident that it may do the job well enough and efficiently enough to maintain the job in the longer term.
Obtaining data rights for SAOC is “going to pay great dividends for the U.S. Air Force and the DoD for a long time,” Hauboldt said. “We recognized early on that the Air Force valued data rights — in other words, the power to cost-effectively sustain and modify the aircraft. We were willing, as an organization, to listen and offer them what they asked for.”
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.