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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... eed-boeing19 februari 2019 10:00 CET
Five-year plan calls for buying 80 of the F-15X planes
The U.S. Air Force’s next budget will request funds for eight new F-15 fighter-bombers from Boeing Co.,
beefing up its inventory with an upgraded version of a plane it last bought in 2001,
even as it pursues the more advanced F-35 from rival Lockheed Martin Corp.
The F-15s will be proposed in the fiscal 2020 budget, expected around March 11,
as the first of a potential 80-plane purchase over the next five years,
said people familiar with the Air Force’s plan.
The new F-15X for the U.S. would be a variation on planes sold to Qatar but
would be able to carry heavier loads of air-to-ground and air-to-air weapons than current F-15s, or the F-35s.
With its internal weapons carriage, the F-35 probably can’t accommodate planned heavier weapons,
such as hypersonic missiles that are now under development.
The Air Force will propose buying the F-15X without reducing the fleet of 1,763 F-35s that it has long planned, the people said.
The service would purchase 48 of the 84 F-35s that were called for last year in the Pentagon’s plan for 2020,
with the remainder going to the Navy and Marines, according to program documents.
Still, Lockheed has been quietly reminding lawmakers and congressional staff of its arguments for the F-35 as the better choice,
including through a “fact sheet” distributed in December.
That was followed by an attack on the F-15X by five senators
who wrote President Donald Trump last week calling the Boeing plane “outdated.”
“The U.S. Air Force fighter budget is unlikely to grow by much,
so the fear is that replacing the F-15 fleet, rather than upgrading the old F-15s,
would take cash away from F-35 procurement,” Richard Aboulafia, a
n aerospace analyst with the Teal Group of Fairfax, Virginia, said in an email.
Boeing said in a statement that it’s “ready
to provide a highly survivable advanced variant of F-15 to the Air Force at an affordable cost.”
The planned F-15X purchase originated from an assessment of the Air Force’s needs by career analysts
in the Pentagon’s independent cost assessment office.
It’s won favor from White House budget officials who agreed
it would fill a niche for an aircraft capable of carrying a heavy load of ordnance,
according to one of the people.
Chicago-based Boeing has offered the aircraft, including engines,
for about $80 million per plane under a fixed-price contract with the first deliveries to come in 2022.
By comparison, the F-35 from Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed is estimated to cost $89 million each
in the latest contract with a goal of $80 million by 2020.
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