A test F-15EX aircraft arrives at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida on March 11, 2021. (U.S. Air Force photo by Samuel King Jr.)
DUBAI AIRSHOW — The first batch of Boeing’s F-15EX Eagle II fighters is running late, but not late enough to trigger a schedule breach if current plans hold, according to an Air Force spokesperson.
However, the service also confirmed that the first four lots of jets — about half the total expected buy — will not come with conformal fuel tanks, a decision that would reduce those fighters’ potential ranges and limit their ability to conduct ground attack missions.
After originally aiming to deliver the program’s third fighter, dubbed EX3, to the Air Force in December 2022, Boeing expects the jet will be in the service’s hands later this month, Defense News previously reported, a delay of nearly a year. Five more aircraft will follow, with deliveries set to complete by the first quarter of 2024, Boeing officials have previously said.
While later than the Air Force and Boeing hoped for, the deliveries are still within the original baseline schedule crafted by the two parties. According to the Air Force spokesperson, the program’s objective for initial operational capability (IOC) was July 2023, a date the program has blown past. But the threshold for IOC is July 2024, which Boeing can achieve by delivering the six remaining lot 1 fighters to the Air Force by that date.
Bottom line: as long as all the lot 1 fighters arrive before July 2024, the baseline schedule will hold. The Air Force previously told Breaking Defense that the program was still within the baseline, though at that time the service was expecting the current group of F-15EX deliveries to complete this year.
“Lot 1B will continue delivery this month through Spring 2024 satisfying the baseline IOC schedule criteria,” the spokesperson said. (Lot 1B refers to the six remaining aircraft scheduled for near-term delivery.)
RELATED: Newest F-35, F-15EX contracts are set. Here’s how much they cost (EXCLUSIVE).
A Government Accountability Office report published earlier this year found that “several production-related issues” contributed to previous schedule delays, with a key driver being “supplier quality problems.” According to Defense News, Boeing also encountered unexpected problems incorporating full-size determinant assembly techniques into the fighter’s production line and lost time shifting assembly work from South Korea to St. Louis.
A tooling design error further caused holes to be “inaccurately drilled” into the windscreen of four fighters, GAO found, which the watchdog said delayed lot 2 aircraft by two months.
Two test F-15EXs are already in the Air Force’s possession, and four more in the current lot will be test aircraft as well. The final two Eagle IIs in lot 1 will be the first combat aircraft for the service and will fly to the Oregon Air National Guard, according to a Boeing spokesperson.
Lt. Col. Richard “Tac” Turner, Commander, 40th Flight Test Squadron, and Lt. Col. Jacob “Duke” Lindaman, Commander, 85th Test & Evaluation Squadron, deliver the first F-15EX to its new home station, Eglin AFB, Florida, 11 March, 2021. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. John Raven)
Conformal Fuel Tanks, Production Schedule
The F-15EX II is a modernized version of the decades-old F-15 airframe, with upgrades like the Eagle Passive Active Warning Survivability System for advanced electronic warfare. The Air Force originally planned to buy 144 of the fighters, but now plans a final fleet of 104.
The F-15EX can deliver more missiles than any other fighter in the Air Force’s inventory, with a carrying capacity of up to 12. However, a Pentagon report released earlier this year [PDF] revealed that the Air Force’s “first operational F-15EX units” won’t be outfitted with conformal fuel tanks (CFTs), and an Air Force spokesperson confirmed to Breaking Defense late last month that CFTs weren’t funded for any of the 54 aircraft in production lots 1-4. (The two test aircraft currently in the Air Force’s inventory have the CFTs.)
Those two CFTs per fighter provide hard points to mount ground-attack weapons, explained Boeing Chief F-15 Pilot Matt Giese on the sidelines of the Dubai Airshow. The fighter can still carry 12 missiles without the CFTs, but may mainly be tasked with air-to-air roles as a result, he said.
“I think it’s the same capability air-to-air wise whether you’re CFT or not, you just lose a lot of gas,” Giese said, adding that the CFTs provide approximately an extra 9,000 pounds of fuel.
The lack of CFTs for lots 1-4 might point to different mission sets the Air Force has in mind for its various Eagle IIs. For jets bound for the Air National Guard, Giese noted those fighters will be tasked primarily with homeland defense — meaning that the Air Force might not prioritize air-to-ground capability for those fighters.
“The reality is the homeland defense mission is about killing guys long ways away,” Giese said, though he noted that “I’d rather have the gas than the extra two degrees of turn rate [or so] that you get when you take the CFTs off.”
Instead of funding CFTs for the first four lots, the service is seeking money in the fiscal 2024 budget for 12 sets of CFTs for lot 5 fighters, and asked Congress through an unfunded priorities list for an additional 12 sets for the same lot, the Air Force spokesperson said. Should lawmakers grant the request, the 24 fighters planned for lot 5 would be fully equipped with CFTs. A lot 5 deal has not yet been finalized.
Separately, with the aerospace giant looking to ramp up production to 24 F-15EXs annually by 2025, Mark Sears, Boeing vice president for fighters, said during a briefing with reporters today that depending on the Air Force’s plans for its final fleet size combined with international customer interest, Boeing may assess raising the jet’s production rate.
“So, depending on when an international partner would want to buy and what that delivery profile would look like, whether or not the US Air Force would continue to buy, we would evaluate having to go beyond two [fighters] per month in probably the tail end of this decade, depending on what that delivery profile would [require],” he said.
The Air Force’s program of record currently plans to complete delivery in 2028, Sears said. And as new customers like Indonesia and possibly others line up for buys, “I think that window just kind of naturally, from where we’re at today [from] contract and then development of an international configuration, probably puts us in that timeline anyways.”