Aviation Week reported that the announced selection by the Indian Navy of a French fighter “is another blow to the future of Boeing’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet assembly line in St. Louis.” The Boeing Company “had already announced plans to wind down F/A-18E/F production in Missouri by 2025, but held out hope that potential orders in India could extend U.S. assembly operations by a year and keep the fighter in production on a new assembly line on the subcontinent.” But India’s Navy announced the selection on Friday of the Dassault Rafale-M “to become its next carrier-based fighter.” Boeing Vice President of Business Development for Air Dominance Programs Bernd Peters said, “So we’ll likely cease production [of the Super Hornet] around the 2025 time frame.”
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Tag: F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter
NASA Completes Super Hornet Tests
ExecutiveGov reports, “NASA Armstrong Research Center has completed complex loads of calibration tests on an F/A-18E Super Hornet aircraft from the U.S. Navy at its Flight Loads Laboratory in Edwards, California.” The testing dealt with the aircraft’s vertical tails, and test engineers activated 84 hydraulic actuators in a total of 87 load cases.
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Navy Demonstrates Live-Virtual-Constructive Capability of Air Combat Training Tech
ExecutiveGov reports that “the U.S. Navy conducted a demonstration in August to test the live-virtual-constructive capability of the Tactical Combat Training System Increment II in an operational environment.” Naval Air Systems Command said “the Naval Aviation Training Systems and Ranges program office, PMA-205, and Advanced Naval Technology Exercise-21 teams conducted the demonstration using F/A-18 and EA-18G aircraft, an operational destroyer, Joint Semi-Automated Forces System, Next Generation Threat System, a guided missile and an F/A-18 simulator through the Navy Continuous Training Environment.” Capt. Lisa Sullivan, PMA-205 program manager, said: “On the surface side, ships have been using a training LVC mode for a while, networking back and forth to exercise coordinators running complex scenarios. Now aviation is part of the mix through validation of TCTS Inc. II as the host system connecting live aircraft into a LVC environment.”
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Canada Remains on Track to Pick New Fighter Jets to Replace CF-18s
The Canadian Press reports that according to Canada’s Department of National Defence Assistant Deputy Minister of Material Troy Crosby, officials remain on track to ending its “decade-long search for a new fighter jet for the Royal Canadian Air Force next year despite challenges and delays from the pandemic.” In an interview with the Canadian Press, Crosby said, “That is a project where COVID has created some challenges. … Despite all of that, I still see the evaluation being completed this year. And that would get us to a point where we could enter whatever the resulting agreements or contracts are next year in 2022.” The “aircraft competing to replace the CF-18 are Lockheed Martin’s F-35, the Boeing Super Hornet and the Saab Gripen.”
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Boeing, US Navy Plan to Develop New Missile for F/A-18 Super Hornet
FlightGlobal reports that The Boeing Company and the US Navy (USN) “plan to co-develop a supersonic land and sea strike missile to be carried aboard the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter.” Boeing announced Tuesday that it “has been awarded $30 million to develop the Supersonic Propulsion Enabled Advanced Ramjet (SPEAR) flight demonstrator with the USN’s Air Warfare Center Weapons Division.” Boeing SPEAR program manager Steve Mercer said that the “SPEAR flight demonstrator will provide the F/A-18 Super Hornet and carrier strike group with significant improvements in range and survivability against advanced threat defensive systems.”
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