Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) program halted.

The losers (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) filed a protest of the contract award to Northrup Grumman.  GAO ordered a stop work for 100 days while they sort thru the paperwork.  Take a 3 month schedule hit right there.  GAO might, after the 100 day hangup, approve the contract award or order the contract rebid, which will take a year. 
   The losers objections are unclear, and mostly unpublished.  What has come out is the Air Force looked at the bidder's re recurring engineering bids and using a lot of bad past experience doubled  all the bids.  Not a bad idea,  contractors typically bid low to get a foot in the door, thinking that they will be able to get their profit margins back up when the Government orders changes, which it always does.  But, what ought to happen when the contractor's underbid, is the government holds them to the original contract.  Fifty years ago, Lockheed under bid on the C-5 job.  USAF made them eat the difference between what Lockheed spent and what Lockheed bid. 
   Fifty years later, USAF lacks that kind of stones.  And, the last big program USAF put out for bid, the KC-46 tanker job, was a disaster.  Boeing protested the award to Airbus, got the contract rebid, and walked away with it.  And Boeing is doing cost overruns and schedule slippages right now. 
   It's hard to tell from where I live want the real story is.  Could be, GAO is allowing a frivolous protest to slow the program down.  Could be USAF did another KC-46 style bungle.  Could be Pentagon procurement regulations are so screwed up that nothing works.  Any way, the program is delayed by the bureaucrats, and delays always raise the cost to the taxpayer. 

Airborne tower of Babel

Long article in Aviation Week deploring the lack of a common data link standard between USAF combat aircraft.  Apparently older aircraft like AWACs and F16's were equipped with a datalink system known as Link16.  The newer F22 has a different system called IFDL and the even newer F35 has a system called MADL.  As you might imagine, the various systems cannot talk to each other.  There is a project, hoping for funding, to build a "translator" box that can talk to all three systems and translate between them. 
   Of course, old fogies like myself wonder just why such a datalink is needed.  Is it to allow aircrews to websurf on their way to target? 
   Way back in the day, the F106 fighter had a data link to the SAGE centers.  When it worked, it allowed the ground based SAGE computers to drive the horizontal situation display in the fighter, and set a steering needle to point to point right at the target.  When it was feeling especially clever it could put a bright circle on the fighter's radarscope highlighting the area in which the target was expected to appear. 
   Headquarters ADC loved datalink (dollie they called it) and insisted upon its use on every practice intercept.  When dollie broke, and the aircrew used trusty voice radio to get vector and altitude to target from the ground  controller, HQ would go ballistic and chew out the controller, the aircrew, and avionics maintenance (me) over the "broken dollie sortie". 
   In actual fact, voice radio worked just fine, everyone knew the procedures, and it doesn't take long to say "Vector 034, Angels 18" over the air.
   But HQ ADC was on a dollie kick and we all did a lot of running around  to make them happy.  Only the then new F106 had dollie.  The older F102, F101, and F89 interceptors lacked it, and my controller friends always said the oldest (F89) was the most likely to score a kill.  Dollie didn't make the F106 more effective. 

The A-10

Aka the Warthog.  A ground attack plane, a jet powered version of the Russian WWII Sturmovic.  It can fly low and slow, just what you need for tank plinking, has a honking big 30 mm Gatling gun, and lots of bombs and missiles.  Nice straight wing, top speed around 400 mph.  Twin engines so you can get home if one takes a hit.  Came into service after Viet Nam, did a fantastic job in the first Gulf War.  Best plane out there for ground attack.  On the other hand, if you are flying an A10 and you get bounced by enemy jet fighters, you are in deep trouble. 
  The Air Force officer corps is pretty much all fighter pilots now that SAC has been disbanded.  And fighter pilots want to fly fighters and do air to air combat.  They like the white silk scarf fluttering in the slip stream and they all want to be the Red Baron.  The idea of getting down into the ground fire and shooting up tanks has no appeal to fighter pilots. 
  This year Congress laid a heavy duty funding cut on all the armed services.  It's actually a real cut, the services get less money than than they did last year.  So, the Air Force looked around for things they could shut down or sell off, to keep the little money left them going into the F35 program.  What to cut?  How about that ugly old A10?  None of us fighter pilots like it, if we get rid of  it we can use the money saved to buy that hot F35 that we do like.
   There has been some squawking from the Army and the Marine Corps, both of which like the A10.  Nobody who saw A10s blowing Saddam Hussein's tanks away in the Gulf Wars is going to feel happy about doing without them.
   The issue probably needs to be resolved in Congress, if Congress still has the ability to resolve anything. 

Time for some Sequestration

The Air Force has been muddling thru the business of buying tanker places for some years now.  The current tanker fleet is largely the KC135 tankers purchased back in the Eisenhower administration.  Worthy planes, but after 50 years of service it's time for replacements.  After quite a bit of bungling, Airbus bids, court fights and hassle, USAF gave a contract to Boeing to make tankers based on the Boeing 767 jetliner.  This should have been straight forward,  make some more of a well proven civilian jet airliner, leave out the seats and put in tanks to hold jet fuel.  So simple.
  USAF has managed to do significant cost enhancement to this job.  First off, they are having Boeing replace the existing 767 cockpit with the newer and jazzier cockpit from the brand new 787.  This means changing all the instruments over to work off the 767 airframe.  It also means reprogramming the 787 stuff.  $oftware is spelled  Money and Program Delays.  The existing 767 cockpit  worked just fine and is still flying hundreds of 767 from here to everywhere, but that wasn't good enough for USAF.  They had an urge to spend tax money, just for the hell of it.
   This procurement program has been running for nearly two years.  They don't expect to deliver any aircraft for another FIVE well paid years.  Boeing plans to spend a whole year working on the refueling boom.  This is just a piece of pipe sticking out the back of the tanker, to which  client aircraft plug in to fill up.  A year to do a piece of pipe is craziness.