ARLINGTON, Va. — The Air Force will formally seek proposals Friday for aircraft that would fly in a low-cost attack plane experiment, with Texton (TXT,) Northrop Grumman (NOC), Boeing (BA) and Embraer (ERJ) seen as potential participants.
Responses from industry are expected within a month, with the selected aircraft flying in tests this summer at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, said Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, military deputy in Air Force acquisition, at an Air Force Association breakfast Thursday.
The Pentagon has debated the idea for a light-attack aircraft for some time and even deployed Vietnam-era propeller-driven planes to Iraq in 2015 to see how they performed against the Islamic State, which lack sophisticated air defenses.
The idea is to reduce wear and tear on more advanced fighters and cut operating expenses. Aircraft like Lockheed's F-35 and Boeing's F/A-18 Super Hornet would still form the backbone of the U.S. fighter fleet for missions in so-called contested environments and against sophisticated planes from China and Russia.
"We want to look at a concept to see if we can have a lower operating cost, a lower unit cost and for something that would be able to operate in a permissive or more permissive environment than what I would require a fourth- or fifth-gen aircraft to operate in," Bunch said.
Textron could submit its AirLand Scorpion, after dropping the plane out of the running for the Air Force's T-X trainer plane contest, or its Beechcraft AT-6 aircraft. After also dropping out of the T-X program, Northrop could propose the plane once envisioned for that contract, according to Mark Bobbi, an aerospace, defense and security analyst at consultancy IHS.
Meanwhile, Boeing and Saab could submit their joint T-X proposal, and Brazil's Embraer could submit its A-29 Super Tucano.
"No one who has developed a trainer in the last 40 years has done it solely for the trainer market," Bobbi said, noting the Pilatus of Switzerland as one exception.
Northrop shares fell 1.5% to 240.28 on the stock market today. Boeing dipped 0.3% to 178.19. Embraer's U.S.-listed shares climbed 1.4% to 243.96. Textron fell 0.4% to 47.65.
In announcing plans for the experiment, acting Air Force Secretary Lisa Disbrow said earlier this month the Air Force needs to "explore off-the-shelf technologies" to curb costs as the service faces budget and workforce constraints.
The price tag for buying the Super Tucano, for example, would be more than $10 million, or about a tenth the current cost of Lockheed's F-35. Operating the Super Tucano would only cost a few thousand dollars per hour vs. $19,000 per hour for Lockheed's F-16 and $44,000 for the F-35A variant, according to Air Force data cited by the Washington Post.
Bunch stressed Thursday that what is now designated as the OA-X experiment is not an official acquisition program and could be scrapped if submissions aren't as mature as the Air Force wants.
And even if the Pentagon did decide to buy new, low-cost attack planes, they wouldn't come at the expense of modernization efforts for fifth-generation fighters.
"Moving in this direction would be additive for what the Air force has for dollars and manpower for today," Bunch said.
Potentially tripping up the Air Force's efforts is the Army's program to replace its helicopters, including Boeing Apaches, which could be sped up to fly in the mid to late-2020s from the current plan for 2030, said IHS analyst Bobbi.
"If the Army accelerates (the Future Vertical Lift program), the whole argument for the fixed-wing light strike goes away," he told IBD. "That's the wild card in the game."
