The KC46A is the replacement for the renowned KC135 refueling bird which had the last production aircraft rolled out in 1965. The KC46A is plagued with problems to include the bone-headed notion to put the refueling crew in the cockpit instead of the rear of the aircraft at the boom and, wait for it, fuel leakage. Just another Boeing aerospace project plagued by quality issues fore and aft.
The aircraft has been in development since Feb. 24, 2011, and its initial flight occurred in Dec. 2014. The current contract, with options, provides Air Mobility Command an inventory of 179 KC-46A tankers with production eventually ramping up to 15 tankers a year. Today, 398 KC-135 Stratotankers are serving with the USAF, of which 156 are in service with the USAF, 70 with the Air Force Reserve, and 172 with the Air National Guard.
Here the latest Category 1 design flaw identified:
The latest deficiency, designated a Category 1 issue based on the degree of risk and operational restrictions it imposes on the aircraft or its operator, involves a faulty fuel pump. Boeing, the company building the tanker, noticed this spring that vibrations from a KC-46 fuel pump were damaging air ducts in its bleed air system.
Oh, and more design flaws:
Among the more high-profile issues involves the tanker’s remote vision system, or RVS — a camera system that tanker operators use to a refuel a receiver aircraft. After years of delay and rework, the Air Force in 2022 approved a redesign of Boeing’s design, dubbed RVS 2.0, that addresses image distortion and shadowing issues in the previous version.
RVS 2.0 was supposed to be delivered this year, but that timeline has since shifted to 2026. Stamey said a recent schedule risk assessment indicates that spring of that year is the target for that delivery.
Apparently, they never talked to the folks with decades of experience from KC135 boom operators who could have told them the advantages of human eyes on the fuel boom while refueling by dealing directly with the thirsty aircraft lining up to refuel and the instant response to real-time troubles during refueling. This is shades of when Boeing did not consult pilots about the flight-control system (MCAS) in the Boeing 737 Max, which played a role in two fatal crashes.
Here’s a trip down memory lane from 2014:
Shortly after January, Boeing notified the government it had found some issues during a Federal Aviation Administration required engineering process. The FAA process discovered anomalies in some of the wire modules, which in a civilian aircraft would be fine, but in military aircraft would not meet requirements, he said.
“Those anomalies were essentially for redundant aircraft systems where you want to have a redundancy in an electrical system,” Thompson said. In military aircraft, “Wires that represent redundancies cannot be put next to each other in the same bundle,” he added.
“The Boeing folks identified some anomalies so they went and got the wire audit where they went and reviewed 98,000 different wire segments.” There were redundancies in less than five percent of the wiring bundles. “In terms of translating bundles, as the spring and summer have progressed, the Boeing folks have been, in essence, redesigning those bundles,” Thompson said.
What the article fails to mention is that those are Chinese sourced wiring boards.
Chinese sourced.
But don’t worry, fast forward ten years and here is what they are saying:
Chinese-made printed wiring boards (PWBs) on U.S. Air Force KC-46A Pegasus tankers by Boeing [BA] represent a low technical risk, DoD acquisition chief William LaPlante ruled last year [2023].
https://www.defensedaily.com/continued-use-of-chinese-printed-wiring-boards-on-kc-46-low-risk-dod-says/air-force/
The brilliant minds at the Boeing company have also ceased production on the 767 cargo model that the KC46A is based on:
Behind it, the KC-46 logged a $700 million loss due to Boeing’s decision to end production of the 767 freighter, the commercial aircraft on which the militarized tanker is based. The company also pointed the finger at the ongoing machinists union strike, which has paused production of commercial airplanes, such as the 767 made in the company’s Seattle facilities.
Only the government would continue to retain the services of a clearly failed company like Boeing which is creating an impressive track record of cascading failures that rivals government performance on everything that it does. Tens of billions here and tens of billions there, pretty soon it looks like real money.
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