Revelation wrote:

The Stearman (Boeing) Model 75 is a biplane formerly used as a military trainer aircraft, of which at least 10,626 were built in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s.[1] Stearman Aircraft became a subsidiary of Boeing in 1934. Widely known as the Stearman, Boeing Stearman or Kaydet, it served as a primary trainer for the United States Army Air Forces, the United States Navy (as the NS & N2S), and with the Royal Canadian Air Force as the Kaydet throughout World War II.

Yet perhaps USAF would not want to evoke the mental image of an eighty year old biplane?

petertenthije wrote:

Revelation wrote:

The Stearman (Boeing) Model 75 is a biplane formerly used as a military trainer aircraft, of which at least 10,626 were built in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s.[1] Stearman Aircraft became a subsidiary of Boeing in 1934. Widely known as the Stearman, Boeing Stearman or Kaydet, it served as a primary trainer for the United States Army Air Forces, the United States Navy (as the NS & N2S), and with the Royal Canadian Air Force as the Kaydet throughout World War II.

Yet perhaps USAF would not want to evoke the mental image of an eighty year old biplane?

Just change the name to make it politically correct: "Stearperson". Done!

RJMAZ wrote:

Wasp would be the perfect name.

A Hornet is the largest member of the wasp family. This trainer looks like a smaller single engined Hornet.

We have Wasp, Hornet, Super Hornet.

bikerthai wrote:

How about Sparrowhawk?
It is the common name for small raptors species found in NA and Europe.

bt

aumaverick wrote:

bikerthai wrote:

How about Sparrowhawk?
It is the common name for small raptors species found in NA and Europe.

bt

You know, you're onto something there! The Navy has the Goshawk. There is already a Jayhawk, Pave Hawk and Nighthawk. It keeps the trainer nomenclature going with the XXXhawk theme.

mxaxai wrote:

How about Merlin? Small, agile and it'd be the first military airplane to bear that name. Also a reference to the Merlin engine that powered the early Spitfires.

“How do you set-up a fair competition between existing and clean-sheet aircraft?” That was the question that Steve Trimble of Aviation Week & Space Technology asked last week in his article about “With USAF T-X Award, Boeing Seizes a Trio of Contracts” (27 September 2018). Boeing and Saab won the T-X trainer jet competition with their clean-sheet design; two other teams—Lockheed Martin and Korean Aerospace Industries, and Leonardo and CAE—had missed with already-proven aircraft. Fairness, however, is not my foremost concern with this award of competition, and it’s not even what I think that Steve meant. What interests me in his story is that the Air Force Department may have shaken off its attachment to the inappropriate simplicity of Lowest-Price, Technically Acceptable (LPTA) contracting. Whatever the fairness, what the Air Force sought first was value.
 
Fairness is an oft-cited objective in public procurement, but I find it a word of subjective and even questionable meaning. I covered this once before, in April 2015. As I wrote back then, in a course at the University of Chicago in 1998, I heard Toby Stuart (now of the Haas School at the University of California at Berkeley) propound that issue of subjectivity. After years of reflection, he had come conclude that the best definition of fair was “I like it”. People will agree that something is fair is it’s good for them. Thus, prospective contractors frequently differ in their views of how fair competitions might be structured.
 
Of far more interest to me is whether the US Air Force, and the US taxpayers, are getting the best deal they can. A recent low point in this regard may have been the competition for new aerial refueling tankers (the KC-X), an issue that I first started covering in January 2010. As part of a series of long essays, I wrote of how applying an LPTA approach would naturally produce a low price, but perhaps not the optimal result. In the third of those arguments, I lamented that the USAF had not written a true request for proposals (RFP), but “just a monstrous RFQ”—a request for quotes. This is because the Air Force ultimately gave no extra credit for exceeding performance parameters in a competition between two seriously dissimilar, off-the-shelf products. In that situation, one can almost assuredly pick the winner before the bids are in. Just ask yourself—which has the lower cost of inputs?
 
Six years later, I wrote of how the outcome was even further sealed by Boeing’s strategic—though perhaps strategically inappropriate—behavior:
 
As an Airbus strategist told me over lunch last week, “we’ve brought competition, and that’s good for the customer.” In the US Air Force's recent contest for the KC-X tanker project, Boeing basically bought the business with a low bid because it was terrified that Airbus would get the chance to build a factory in the US, putting an end to its protectionist arguments. Airbus lost, and the USAF got a great price, but Airbus then decided to build the factory anyway. That’s because in spite of the high corporate taxes... the United States is a remarkably good place for building aircraft. So now Airbus is not just a European company, but an American company too, already delivering A320 commercial airliners from Alabama.
 
The taxes are coming down, of course, and for all the Trump Administration's protectionism, the obsession seems to focus on jobs (in an already tight job market!), and not some goofy sense of anti-Franco-German techno-nationalism. We wish that were all over, but the narrower KC-X drama continues. While Boeing’s KC-46 tanker—based on the off-the-shelf 767—is still having developmental problems, Airbus’s KC-330 MRTT is flying for the air forces of four countries— Australia, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia—with several more to follow.
 
But enough beating on Boeing. Those folks had a deservedly banner month in September. Most notable was how Boeing and Saab won the bid for "up to 475 aircraft and 120 simulators” (as Sydney Freedberg retold the details at Breaking Defense) at an all-in price of $9.2 billion. Only winning bids are public, so unless the other bidders reveal their numbers, we will not know whether the USAF took the lowest, middle, or highest bid. We only know that the service’s representatives concluded that Boeing and Saab were offering the best value.
 
To win the T-X competition, as with any competition for a complex military product, prospective bidders needed to meet a long list of requirements. But unlike the KC-X competition, the scoring would not stop there, with their bids evaluated on an LPTA basis. Instead, the Air Force would assign extra credit, up to certain limits, for proposals whose aircraft offered to exceed requirements in operationally useful ways.
 
The first example in the list that the Air Force provided was high-g maneuvering. The minimum requirement the department sought was 6.5g, because aspiring fighter pilots need to understand how to operate, well, like fighter pilots. The Air Force would then award $13.2 million off the evaluated price for every additional 0.1g from 6.5 to 7.0. Fighter pilots who can learn to turn harder and sharper will presumably learn more, because it’s possible that air combat maneuvering is still a thing. Bidders would get another $4.4 million off their bids for every additional 0.1g from that point, up to a maximum of 7.5g. At a certain point, after all, even the instructor pilots will pass out. This meant that the bidders could earn a deduction from their evaluated prices of up to $88 million for proposing an airplane that could turn at 7.5g.
 
By maximizing every criterion, bidders could earn deductions of $338 million in the scoring. That’s only a 3.7 percent premium to pay for valuable performance, so it’s fair to ask whether the team at the Air Force Department could have acted more aggressively. For now, I won’t. I’ll just observe that the Air Force’s procurement people could have taken the easy way out. They could have sought the lowest bid bar none, and gone home early every day. Instead, they worked hard (quite some time back) to devise an economic case for each adjustable criterion. Last month, they got a best-value result, and they should be pleased with their work. The rest of us who care about defense-industrial matters can simply be relieved that the worst excesses of LPTA may be behind us.

tjh8402 wrote:

it would seem that tradition is for some sort of bird of pray reference.

Revelation wrote:

Interesting tweet ( https://twitter.com/IBD_GRich/status/10 ... 9215555585 ):

Gillian Rich @IBD_GRich

@BoeingCEO said he couldn't comment on @LockheedMartin's comment that it would have lost $5B on 3 defense contracts to meet Boeing's offerings. But said that $BA was "able to bring the affordable solution because of investment in productivity" like advanced digital design etc.

Is LM behind the times on advanced digital design?

Revelation wrote:

Is LM behind the times on advanced digital design?

Revelation wrote:

yet that doesn't preclude some confidence (false or otherwise) that they feel they can set lower prices due to many things including advanced digital design.

Revelation wrote:

The fact that T-X gives them enough volume to stabilize the STL factory has to be a big thing to Boeing, and presumably the DoD as well.

Revelation wrote:

Interesting tweet ( https://twitter.com/IBD_GRich/status/10 ... 9215555585 ):

Gillian Rich @IBD_GRich

@BoeingCEO said he couldn't comment on @LockheedMartin's comment that it would have lost $5B on 3 defense contracts to meet Boeing's offerings. But said that $BA was "able to bring the affordable solution because of investment in productivity" like advanced digital design etc.

Is LM behind the times on advanced digital design?

Ozair wrote:

No idea how price conscious they were but building and flying the prototype obviously cost Boeing money.

Boeing took a charge of almost $700 million in the latest quarter to cover extra investment after its recent contract wins for a Navy drone, a new Air Force trainer jet and helicopters used to protect nuclear missile bases.

Revelation wrote:

bikerthai wrote:

Ozair wrote:

No idea how price conscious they were but building and flying the prototype obviously cost Boeing money.

Yep, and they just took a charge for it . . .

From the Wall Street Journal

Boeing took a charge of almost $700 million in the latest quarter to cover extra investment after its recent contract wins for a Navy drone, a new Air Force trainer jet and helicopters used to protect nuclear missile bases.

bt

All this while buying $2.5B in its own shares and paying $1B in dividends.

They benefited from some tax settlements from previous audits that largely offset the $700M spend on the work related to the new contracts.

Ref: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/b ... s-to-flow/

Revelation wrote:

Interesting tweet ( https://twitter.com/IBD_GRich/status/10 ... 9215555585 ):

Gillian Rich @IBD_GRich

@BoeingCEO said he couldn't comment on @LockheedMartin's comment that it would have lost $5B on 3 defense contracts to meet Boeing's offerings. But said that $BA was "able to bring the affordable solution because of investment in productivity" like advanced digital design etc.

Is LM behind the times on advanced digital design?

JayinKitsap wrote:

The KAI T-50 Golden Eagle first flew in 2002, so it may not have a modern digital design to start from.

Boeing did build and fly two Trainers, surely they have a pretty good idea of what it cost to get here. In this case a clean sheet could have taken out a lot of systems as well as payload. The engine is stock so pretty easy to estimate.

So why did such an organisation choose a mostly Korean-built trainer aircraft over something developed internally? According to Weiss, it came down to the metrics of cost, capability, schedule and risk.

He says work ceased on the clean-sheet alternative in late 2015 with 80% of the detailed design work complete, approximately five years after the two-pronged approach to T-X was approved.

“It’s in the DNA of the Skunk Works to design new airplanes," Weiss explains. “This was a very sweet airplane and folks were passionate about it. It was very capable and it would do everything the US Air Force was looking for in the T-X aircraft.

“[But] we’re all-in on the T-50 now and we’re comfortable about that. “We’re happy we did that study because now we understand the facts and the data. The facts and the data are that this is the right solution for the US air force because it’s here now, it meets their capability requirements, there’s no schedule risk.”

The T-50A will be delivered as a block upgrade to the baseline T-50. It adds an embedded training system, fifth-generation cockpit, open system architecture and in-flight refuelling.

Weiss says the clean-sheet alternative might have cost approximately eight times more to develop, without adding significant capability “beyond a modernised T-50”. Moreover, it would struggle to meet the air force’s recently revised initial operational capability (IOC) date of 2024.

Ozair wrote:

If we consider that Boeing’s cost was reportedly 30% less than LM as per the quote, then we are looking at a massive unit cost reduction above and beyond. Alternatively Boeing went very cheap on the simulator component of the deal hoping ICT advancements will save them costs in the future. All that is before Boeing actually delivers a production worthy aircraft for IOC in 2024. LM per the above quote didn’t believe they could do it deliver that clean sheet before 2024 but perhaps that is a standpoint they developed based on their then ongoing test and dev of the F-35.

Dutchy wrote:

30% less? That is quite a big cab indeed. Do we know the price leave of the different contenders? The Boeing should have cost about the same or less as the Leonardo entry.

We will see if Boeing can make money on this one.

“We saw the T-50A has better price competitiveness than its competitors because the aircraft was the only candidate already in production without development costs, but it was a long shot in the face of price dumping.”

...

“We participated in the price competition strategically in collaboration with Lockheed Martin, but we were not selected due to the wide gap from Boeing low-price offering,” KAI said in a Sept. 27 release, when the contract award was announced.

The T-X contract awarded to the Boeing-Saab team is worth $9.2 billion, about $7 billion less than the originally estimated budget. The partnership beat out both Leonardo DRS and a Lockheed Martin-KAI partnership.

himself wrote:

Interesting, but the $691 million was just the latest earnings adjustment. Most of the T-X development was done about two years ago. Makes me wonder if they hid their expenses in all those KC-46A charges

seahawk wrote:

If they can make a light combat version with an AESA radar and ECM for less than 30 million, it should be hugely attractive to many F-5 operators.

seahawk wrote:

If they can make a light combat version with an AESA radar and ECM for less than 30 million, it should be hugely attractive to many F-5 operators.

That’s because Boeing believes that the Air Force’s order of 351 T-X jets is just the beginning. It could sell up to 2,600 aircraft in training or attack configuration globally over several decades, he said.

"In the first half of this year we will decide on where we will allocate our production in the USA," Buskhe said during an annual results presentation on 15 February.

Saab was awarded an initial $117 million contract in October 2018 to cover its involvement in the T-X programme's engineering, manufacturing and development phase until 2022. It will be responsible for producing the jet's rear fuselage under a partnership agreement with prime contractor Boeing.

"It's good for Saab and [its] Aeronautics [unit] to have that capacity in the USA," Buskhe says of the future facility, noting that it will help to bring the company "closer to the US customer", as it eyes further business opportunities.

While Boeing and Saab are still determining their joint sales strategy for the T-X, Buskhe says he has already visited "a handful of countries" to discuss the product. "We can already see huge interest for the trainer system around the world," he notes.

"First of all, we focus on the US, to deliver there, but we are creating a capability to take more orders," Buskhe says.

The US Air Force expects to buy an initial 351 of the new type to replace its Northrop T-38 trainers, following a $9.2 billion selection decision made last September. However, Boeing has forecast a potential future market opportunity to produce 2,600 examples to meet additional US requirements and international demand. "It's a good number," Buskhe agrees.

Outside of Australia, Breckenridge said Boeing is in discussions with "several" other international customers and that in the Asia-Pacific region there was a "lot of opportunity" for exports of the T-X trainer.