Re: new tankers for usaf (a bit off topic)


Message posted by Magoo on December 23, 2001 at 14:01:55 PST:

There are probably two reasons for a lease arrangement rather than an outright purchase.

The 767 is now a 20+ year old design, so there is little merit is building a whole new fleet around a design that will probably be obsolete in 20 years.

As we have seen on Steve Hauser's excellent site and in other places, there are several radical designs on the drawing boards for 'diamond wing' tanker/transport aircraft, mainly from Lockheed and Boeing I think. This is probably the way of the future, but cannot be developed overnight. It will be at least 10-15 years before such a design will have evolved enough to become a viable military tanker/transport. A lease arrangement from Boeing will see the desired tanker capacity maintained through to when these designs start becoming available, and then the 767s can be handed back to Boeing.

In the meantime, the KC-135s are running out of airframe hours. A couple of hundred of the younger airframes (which are ALL at least 36 years old!) are being upgraded with new engines and cockpits, but that still leaves the fleet one or two hundred airframes short (they never did build enough KC-10s!). The tanker fleet is being stretched thinner every day, and if the US wants to maintain its policy of being able to fight in two major regional conflicts at once whilst maintaining a home defense capability, then more tankers are needed, and soon.

There are probably only three aircraft currently flying (and still in production) that have the offload capacity and payload/range to be considered as viable tankers; The 747, the 767, and the Airbus A330/340. The 747 design is certainly in its twilight years now and probably wont be in production in five years time. There are certainly many 747 airframes parked at Mojave and places like that which are still young in hours and could be picked up cheaply. The A330/340 is a European design, and therefore is at once 'behind the eight-ball'!

Therefore, the 767 almost wins it by default, not only because it is a US design, but also because there is capacity in the production line to start building tomorrow! If only Boeing had been able to keep the MD-11 in production for another couple of years!

The other reason which was eluded to by Sen McCain in the transcript is that an order for 100 jets from Boeing will almost certainly see it through these tough times and maintain a capability and knowledge base at what is now the last remaining large-jet manufacturer in the US! It's no different to the government subsidizing US wheat, or beef, or other agricultural products to make them price competitive in world markets. It isn't free-trade, but it's been done for decades in other markets and industries, so why not with Boeing as well?

Magoo


In Reply to: Re: new tankers for usaf (a bit off topic) posted by zipper on December 20, 2001 at 9:29:45 PST:

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