Lockheed, Airbus Expect U.S. Air Force To Increase Short-Term Tanker Buy

LE BOURGET—Lockheed Martin and Airbus expect to see the U.S. Air Force revert to something resembling its original tanker replacement plan, buying more refuelers after the end of its Boeing KC-46 program to bridge a gap to an advanced, clean-sheet design that is likely to come later than the service is hoping for.

The Air Force announced in March it would cancel its proposed plan to buy 150 or more tankers to come online after the last of 179 KC-46s are delivered in 2029 and before a future replacement comes in the 2040 timeframe. The plan now is to accelerate that future tanker, called the Next-Generation Aerial Refueling System (NGAS), to the mid-2030s and buy a smaller amount of additional KC-46s to cover the shorter gap.

The service contends there is no need to start a new developmental contest to cover the smaller gap with a reduced fleet, and the U.S. Congress is currently considering the approach as part of the fiscal 2024 defense policy bill.

Lockheed Martin has teamed up with Airbus to offer a modified A330 Multi-Role Tanker Transport (MRTT), called LMXT, for the program. The LMXT takes the in-use MRTT and adds U.S.-specific capabilities, such as new operator stations for command and control and under-belly tanks to provide increased amounts of fuel. Lockheed announced earlier this month it had selected GE Aerospace’s CF6-80E1 to power its fleet.

Greg Ulmer, Lockheed’s executive vice president for aeronautics, told Aerospace DAILY his expectation is the NGAS program would be pushed out to the future because of some of the new technology required. The Air Force has asked for a clean-sheet design with a focus on connectivity and survivability, and has raised the possibility of using a blended-wing-body (BWB) design.

Ulmer said with NGAS moving to later in the decade, the service would need more tankers in the interim to get there. Lockheed has said it could deliver LMXTs, first built by Airbus in France and Spain, by 2029 as it builds facilities in Alabama and Georgia. The Air Force, however, had said it expects LMXTs would be delivered much later, starting in 2034. Both Airbus and Lockheed contest that date.

Jean-Brice Dumont, head of military air systems at Airbus, said during a June 20 press conference at the Paris Air Show here that he did not know where that date came from, adding, "We will deliver way earlier."

That specifically depends on requirements, which will guide how the companies will “tune our configuration and then meet the schedule,” Dumont said.

“So that requires us to stay very, very close to the buyer, to have the right configuration and to hit the ground running,” he said. “We have defined our setup.”

Ulmer said he expects requirements for the program, now known as the KC-135 Recapitalization, to come out in the third or fourth quarter of this fiscal year. The requirements for NGAS would take shape over the next four to five years, he said.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall specifically mentioned BWB as a potential characteristic of NGAS. The service wants to fly a BWB prototype in 2027, with a selection expected soon under a Defense Innovation Unit effort. Though some companies have pressed forward on this idea, such as JetZero recently unveiling a dual military and commercial design earlier this year, neither Airbus nor Lockheed Martin are as excited.

“I think we’re not far,” Dumont said. “What we’re thinking about refueling at large is that you a need a big station in the air, and we don’t necessarily see how you could have a blended-wing body of that size in the near to mid-term.”

A BWB would be more likely in the 2040-and-beyond timeframe, not mid-2030s, Ulmer says. The LMXT includes some capabilities he sees as the “beginnings” of NGAS, including the autonomous refueling Airbus has demonstrated and a possibility to fly with reduced crew—a priority recently expressed by the Air Force's Air Mobility Command. The specifics will need to be outlined by the service, so designs can be refined.

“The requirement definitions and the technology required to meet those requirements remain to be seen,” Ulmer said in an interview at Lockheed Martin’s Le Bourget chalet.  “And what kind of stealth characteristics, how much fuel do you want to offload, do you want to be penetrating ... All those things remain to be seen, and so those will define the time horizon required to meet the requirements."