Fred Smith, som har foredratt på Flyoperativt Forum om P-8, er nå i KC-46 teamet, her på Le Bourget sammen med kollega Reinhard Lillebø. To bilder tatt av meg. Det som er problemet som adresseres i artikkelen, styrer bommen helt akterut. (Red.)
Fred Smith og Reinhard LillebøA new design is almost ready for the KC-46′s
most troubled system
By: Valerie Insinna 11 hours ago
10
Once the Remote Vision System is overhauled, the
KC-46 will be cleared for combat operations. (Staff Sgt. Victoria Nelson/U.S.
Air Force)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force and Boeing have
almost finalized a new design of the problem-plagued system that must be overhauled before the KC-46 tanker is ready for combat operations, the
service’s acquisition executive said Nov. 24.
Unlike legacy tankers, where boom operators look
out a window and rely on line-of-sight visual cues to guide the refueling boom
into a receiver aircraft, KC-46 boomers use a series of cameras and sensors
called the Remote Vision System. After years of disagreements between the Air Force and KC-46 prime
contractor Boeing about whether the current RVS met requirements, the parties
in April agreed to replace the original system with a completely redesigned
“RVS 2.0.”
“We’ve completed nearly every aspect of the design
except the actual projection method,” Will Roper, the Air Force’s assistant
secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said during a roundtable
with reporters last week.
The Air Force is considering two different options
to project the images from the tanker’s rear camera system to the boom
operators who sit at the front of the aircraft: a collimated mirror design,
which uses a curved mirror to project a wide field of view to the user, and an
LCD-type screen similar to modern televisions.
Roper characterized the difference between the two
methods as “a hyper-stereo system” that would deliver near-perfect optics
versus “a more mature technology” with less risk.
“Once they’ve selected that final projection
method, the rest of the design is complete, so we’ll be ready to go ahead and
start building a laboratory system,” Roper said. “Every component that we would
install on the jet, we’ll just do that on the ground, and that would give us a
lot of confidence that when we install the jet itself, that it will work as
advertised.”
The Air Force plans to buy at least 179 KC-46s,
with the first tanker accepted by the service in January 2019. Boeing agreed to take total
financial responsibility for developing the new RVS system, cutting the new
design into the production line and modifying tankers already delivered to the
Air Force.
So far, the company has delivered more than 30
KC-46s to the service, which all must receive a retrofit service.
As a short-term stopgap, Boeing offered an enhanced version of the current RVS system to the Air Force in order to bridge the gap
before RVS 2.0 comes online in 2023 or 2024.
If the service ultimately chose to move forward
with the so-called RVS 1.5, Boeing could start incorporating those upgrades in
the second half of 2021, according to Mike Hafer, the company’s KC-46 global
sales lead, who spoke during a briefing in September.
But Roper stressed that “it’s really 2.0 that has
the lion’s share of our attention.”
The Air Force completed its assessment of the enhanced system this
fall. While there are “a few capabilities” that the service will cut into the
baseline system, Roper said that none of the improvements are
“earth-shattering” or have changed the Air Force’s view that a newly designed
system is needed to meet requirements.
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