The Air Force has awarded Boeing [BA] a $2.3 billion Lot 10 production order to build 15 more KC-46A tankers.
With the latest production order, Boeing said it’s now under contract for 153 of the aerial refueling tankers globally.
“We appreciate our partnership with the U.S. Air Force, which allows for the expansion of the capacity and capability of the KC-46A fleet,” Lynn Fox, Boeing’s KC-46 program manager, said in a statement following the award announcement on Tuesday evening. “We understand the advantages that KC-46 capabilities give the warfighters, and in the current global environment, we continue to focus our investments on evolving the aircraft for the changing needs of the mission”
Work on the latest production order is expected to be completed by the end of July 2027, according to the Pentagon.
The new KC-46A order follows the nearly $2.3 billion Lot 9 production award in late January for 15 KC-46A tankers (Defense Daily, Jan. 26 2023).
Boeing noted, to date, it has delivered 76 KC-46As to the U.S. Air Force and two to the Japan Air Self-Defense Force.
The KC-46A system program office in October said it’s awaiting Federal Aviation Administration certification of commercial cameras on the KC-46A tanker’s Remote Vision System 2.0 (RVS 2.0) to finish the latter’s Critical Design Review (CDR) (Defense Daily, Oct. 16).
A December 2022 Selected Acquisition Report (SAR) released in October by DoD said that “CDR closure is pending resolution of one remaining critical action item: Developing a jointly agreed-to plan for airworthiness certification of the commercial-off-the-shelf cameras.”
The Air Force and Boeing agreed on the RVS 2.0 redesign of the original RVS on April 2, 2020 to fix faulty RVS depth perception, a shortfall that may lead to scraping of the boom on aircraft being refueled–damage that can be especially perilous for low-observable aircraft, such as the F-22 and F-35 fighters.