By Marina Malenic
SEATTLE—Boeing [BA] is pitching the Air Force a new version of the Navy’s P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane to take the place of the aging E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS).
Jim Eisenhart, Boeing’s senior business development manager for airborne warning systems, said last month that a new fleet of 17 weaponized, 737-based aerial ground surveillance (AGS) planes with a next-generation radar would cost the Pentagon $5.5 billion. Eisenhart noted that it would cost approximately as much to modernize the E-8 fleet with new engines and avionics.
“What we are saying to the Air Force is, take advantage of the Navy’s $6 billion development effort,” Eisenhart told Defense Daily during a Jan. 27 interview. He added that Air Force-specific needs for communications and other equipment would amount to a “minimal” development effort on top of what the Navy has already spent on the P-8.
The Air Force has already spent $22 billion to develop and sustain the E-8 fleet, according to budget documents. Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] concept for a modernized version of the aircraft includes installing Ku- or X-band multifunction radars, which would create synthetic aperture radar images.
A new engine is, however, the most pressing JSTARS upgrade, should the Air Force choose to keep the current fleet. The 40-year-old engines are causing massive maintenance bills and preventing optimum mission performance.
To date, Congress has supported only incremental funding for new engines. Two ship sets of JT8D replacement engines are currently on order, and an additional two are in the pending defense budget. Four sets are programmed for 2013 and five each in 2014 and 2015. Pratt & Whitney, a division of United Technologies [UTX] builds the replacement engines.
Replacing the engines on the aircraft has cost more than projected. The Air Force has failed in the past to garner approval to shift around money for the new engines.
Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter in 2009 designated JSTARS as a “special-interest program” that receives high-level scrutiny and directed the Air Force to continue the JSTARS re-engining system-design-and-development phase.
An ongoing analysis of alternatives for ground-moving-target-indicator solutions will help determine if more than four JSTARs will be re-engined, or if different aircraft could address the need, Air Force officials have said. The service is debating the fundamental question of where future investments should be made for such target-tracking aircraft (Defense Daily, March 9, 2010).