EVERETT — In an open letter last month, Sen. John McCain took the Defense Department to task for delays in Boeing’s KC-46 aerial refueling tanker development program.
Boeing won the bid to design the replacement for the Air Force’s aging primary tanker with a fast-paced schedule. It promised it would stay on track, thanks in part to its experience building military tankers.
However, because of supplier and design problems, flight and ground tests for the plane, which is assembled in Everett, are nine months behind schedule.
Those delays put the “program at risk of not meeting” its delivery deadline, McCain said in the letter, which he sent Aug. 28 to Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
Because of the delays, the Air Force has pushed back its decision on whether to start low-rate production until the second half of 2016, McCain said.
That decision originally was scheduled for this month.
That could prevent delivery of “this critical capability to our warfighters as promised and on schedule,” McCain said.
Boeing has to deliver the first 18 combat-ready planes by August 2017.
The Defense Department wants 179 KC-46A Pegasus tankers by 2027. It is the first of a three-stage plan to overhaul the country’s aging fleet of aerial refueling tankers.
The longtime Republican senator from Arizona is an influential member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. He has a history of taking the Pentagon — and particularly the Air Force — to task over weapons development programs costs and schedules.
McCain’s most recent criticism, though, left some aerospace analysts scratching their heads.
“I would hope that John McCain would have a better grasp of this issue than he does,” said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst and vice president with the Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia.
After all, the Air Force had a plan more than a decade ago to lease 100 tankers from Boeing, but McCain helped blocked that proposal. That prompted a messy and drawn-out bidding process that Boeing won in the end, he said. “In the context of a dozen years delay, what’s a few more months?”
In the bid competition, McCain had backed the entry from Boeing’s rival, the Europe-based Airbus Group, which was then known as EADS.
Boeing has already begun initial production in order to deliver those first 18 planes on time.
McCain and Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, also sent a letter to the defense secretary criticizing the Air Force’s financial planning on the Long Range Strike Bomber program.
The letter demanded explanation for how the Air Force miscalculated 10-year cost estimates for the Long Range Strike Bomber program, which jumped from $33.1 billion for 2015 to 2024 to $58.4 billion for 2016 to 2025. Boeing and Lockheed Martin have teamed together to compete against Northrop Grumman for the contract.
The Air Force is expected to award the contract sometime this month.
Dan Catchpole: 425-339-3454; dcatchpole@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @dcatchpole.
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