US airmen to go to Australia in June for E-7 Wedgetail training

Around five dozen American airmen will head to Australia this summer to learn fly and repair the E-7 Wedgetail command-and-control jet, because the U.S. Air Force looks to speed up the acquisition program by any means essential.

Their visit — 4 years before the Air Force expects to receive its first E-7 — goals to hurry up the service’s transition away from its nearly 50-year-old E-3 Sentry aerial goal tracking jets.

Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown Jr. noted the upcoming trip at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday, through which Department of the Air Force leadership defended their budget priorities for the approaching fiscal 12 months.

“We’re going to have the option to send … in June, near 50 to 60 of our airmen to really start training on the E-7s, so once we do get our aircraft, we’ll have trained operators and maintainers to assist speed up bringing the E-7 into our inventory,” Brown said.

The fashionable airframes would improve the Air Force’s ability to inform who’s traveling in nearby airspace, where they’re going and the way quickly — information that’s crucial for keeping tabs on foreign forces or for steering friendly aircraft in an air campaign.

In February, the service awarded Boeing a $1.2 billion contract to start work on two prototype jets which are slated for delivery in 2027. It plans to purchase a complete of 26 E-7s by 2032.

Australia, Turkey, South Korea and the UK already own, or are within the strategy of constructing, their very own E-7s as well.

Readying the primary two prototypes is predicted to require $2.7 billion and 4 years in total: two years to construct the business Boeing 737 airframes, plus one other two years to outfit and test them with military-grade radars and communications equipment.

That timeline remains to be too slow for Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who said the service hasn’t found any feasible ways to speed up this system’s early stages. The service is attempting to make it possible for Boeing to deliver more aircraft faster once full production gets underway in 2025.

Pressed by Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., on what became of an additional $200 million that Congress provided last December to hurry up the acquisition, Brown said it helped pay for initial development and to get a head start on build up it`s inventory of E-7 parts.

But Kendall couldn’t say for certain whether receiving more cash than requested has saved this system any time. He argued the initial jets will take 4 years no matter how much money Congress throws at them.

“I did a private review of the steps which are essential to get it into the primary phase of testing, and we couldn’t discover a strategy to redo that,” he said.

Extra money would help speed later batches of aircraft, Kendall told lawmakers, however the service felt it couldn’t afford to ask for that funding within the fiscal 2024 budget. The Air Force requested $681 million to develop the jet in the approaching 12 months, plus one other $633 million to hurry its delivery as a part of a separate wish list to Congress.

“That program has been moving as fast as we’re in a position to move it,” Kendall said.

While the E-7 is one in all several programs which are designed to rapidly deliver prototypes, the service still faces funding shortfalls which will keep those from moving forward, in response to the budget documents.

But demand for the aircraft is mounting because the E-3s grow dearer and difficult to keep up. The Air Force is within the strategy of retiring its 31-jet Sentry fleet, which could number just 16 by the tip of fiscal 2024.

The earlier the U.S. version of the Wedgetail can arrive to interchange them, the higher, Air Force officials argue.

“I just wanted greater than twins,” Air Combat Command boss Gen. Mark Kelly said in February, referring to the primary two E-7s. “I need as lots of those kids as I can.”