Despite the posturing, Air Force officials say the T-X competition will likely come down to something far less glamorous than mysterious trailers or high-G maneuvers: the price tag.
When choosing the industry team that will build 350 T-X aircraft to train the next generation of pilots, the service will weight affordability much more heavily than exceeding performance requirements, Air Education and Training Command (AETC) chief Lt. Gen. Darryl Roberson tells Aviation Week.Air Force is focused on getting an affordable T-X
High performance is incentivized but will not have a significant impact on the outcome
Latest Air Force thinking aligns with Boeing-Saab team’s approach
T-X program office will likely issue one more draft RFP before releasing a final version in December
“Affordability is one of the primary factors we are looking for,” Roberson said during an interview at the AFA conference. “Affordability overall is going to have a much bigger impact than the difference between threshold and objective performance.”
“The No. 1 mission is to meet the threshold requirements of the Air Force advanced pilot training,” Boeing Phantom Works President Darryl Davis told reporters after the rollout ceremony— an approach that aligns precisely with Roberson’s comments to Aviation Week. “If you are going to control cost, you have to drive how you actually meet all those requirements,” Davis said.
By contrast, Lockheed Martin and its partner, Korea Aerospace Systems, seem to be betting that the Air Force will ultimately pick a low-risk, high-performance T-X. The T-50As have proven in flight testing that they easily meet the service’s objective performance requirements for the T-X, with a maximum G-capability of 8, sustained G-capability of 7.5 and 25-deg. angle of attack, Lockheed’s chief T-50A test pilot, Mark Ward, said during AFA.......
The Air Force is certainly pushing for a high-performance T-X because leaders want the new fleet of trainers to replicate the capabilities of the F-35s and F-22s future pilots will fly, Roberson acknowledges. “The closer that we can get training-wise to replicating that fifth-generation environment, the more comfortable we are going to feel turning somebody loose for the first time on an airplane like that,” he says.
But the way the RFP is structured, contractors stand to win a total of $388 million in performance incentives, Roberson points out—just 2% of the estimated $16.3 billion T-X program. This is likely not a large enough amount to have a significant impact on the outcome of the competition, he says.
