This Week In AFLCMC History – July 15 - 21, 2024

  • Published
  • By Air Force Life Cycle Management Center History Office
15 Jul 1969 (Hill AFB/Fighters and Advanced Aircraft Directorate)
 Fifty-five years ago today, Hill AFB’s Ogden Air Materiel Area’s modification line began installing MB-5 Autopilots on Air National Guard (ANG) F-101B and F-101F aircraft. In total, forty-eight F-101Bs and nine F-101Fs were modified, before flying back to their home units at the 101st Fighter Group (Bangor, Maine), the 119th Fighter Group (Fargo, North Dakota), and the 141st Fighter Group (Spokane, Washington). The project was completed in approximately 15 months—eighteen days ahead of schedule. The MB-5 upgrade augmented the autopilot system with a redundant channel in the pitch limiter subsystem.
 
16 Jul 1999 (Mobility and Training Aircraft Directorate)
Today, 25 years ago, a $370 million contract was awarded to Lockheed Martin Corporation to produce seven more C-130J Super Hercules aircraft for the Air Force, including four for the Air National Guard. The C-130J flies higher, faster, and farther than older C-130 models, can take off and land in shorter distances, and also incorporates technologies to reduce manpower requirements and lower operating costs. Physically, perhaps the easiest way to tell the difference be-tween the J-model and older C-130s is that the C-130J has a six-bladed composite propeller (paired up with a Rolls-Royce AE2100D3 turboprop engine), where older C-130 propellers typically have only four blades (though today some older models have transitioned or are transitioning to eight-bladed propellers—a periodic modernization program that’s been going since the early 2000s as budgets allow).
 
17 Jul 1929 (Propulsion Directorate/Armament Directorate)
Since the 1910s American professor Dr. Robert H. Goddard had been experimenting with rockets at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1920, he posited that rockets could reach the moon, earning a derisive editorial from the New York Times, claiming that he lacked “the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools” for suggesting rockets could function in the vacuum of space. Undeterred, Goddard continued his pioneering work, making the world’s first flight of a liquid-fueled rocket in 1926. On July 17, 1929, he launched an 11-foot-long version that carried a small camera and a barometer. The Army Air Corps was an early sponsor of his work and established its own facilities for rocket research, development, and testing at Wright Field in the 1930s. It first used rockets as small air-to-surface missiles and as Jet (or Rocket) Assisted Take Off (JATO/RATO) “bottles” attached to aircraft to boost their takeoff power. Almost exactly 40 years after today’s milestone, the NY Times retracted its 1920 editorial...as Apollo 11 headed to the moon.
 
18 Jul 1934 (Bombers Directorate)
Despite meager budgets during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Army Air Corps research and development had advanced the technologies that produced the first “modern” all-metal bomber, the Martin B-10. Its service debut in 1933 was overshadowed by the Air Corps’ disastrous (and fatal) attempt to take over flying air mail routes. Its leadership decided to garner positive publicity by sending ten of its new YB-10s to Alaska on a photo survey mission—a significant feat at a time when the regular Army argued airplanes shouldn’t fly farther than infantry could march in 3 days, and the Navy said Air Corps planes shouldn’t operate past “green waters.” The flight was led by Lt Col Henry “Hap” Arnold and managed at Wright Field, while the planes were prepped at Patterson Field (Area A). They departed Dayton for Bolling Field on 18 July 1934. The official flight began the next day and lasted 26 hours. They returned home to great fanfare on 20 August.
 
19 Jul 1984 (Tinker AFB/Hanscom AFB/Electronic Systems Dir.)
On today’s date, 40 years ago, the Air Force’s Tactical Air Command (TAC) took possession of its first E-3B Sentry at Tinker AFB, Oklahoma. Also known as an AWACS, for “Airborne Warning And Control System,” the E-3 (still flown today, though in the process of being retired) is a command and control battle management (C2BM), target detection and tracking, and surveillance plane that’s been in use since the mid-1970s. The program originated at AFLCMC’s predecessors at Wright-Patterson AFB before transferring to the Electronic Systems Division at Hanscom in the late 1960s. The original E-3A version of the AWACS had been flying out of Tinker since 1977, where the E-3A to E-3B upgrade modifications were also conducted.
 
21 Jul 1994 (Fighters and Advanced Aircraft Directorate)
On today’s date thirty years ago, the 86th Fighter Wing held a “Fighter Farewell” ceremony at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, as the last of the wing’s F-16 Fighting Falcons left Ramstein for Aviano Air Base, Italy, where they were taken in by the 31st Fighter Wing. The 86th Fighter Wing switched to an airlift mission shortly after, becoming the 86th Airlift Wing, and USAFE fighter operations terminated out of Ramstein Air Base. Earlier this year, however, on 6 Jun 2024, Ramstein again—briefly—became a hub of fighter activity when thirty-seven fighter jets from nine NATO countries arrived at the base to participate in “1v1,” USAFE’s “first-ever basic fighter maneuvers exercise” at Ramstein.
 
 
25 Years Ago This Week in AFLCMC History: 20 July 1999
The F-22 (Super) Cruises Into History
 
As the US Air Force’s newest and most-capable air dominance fighter, the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor entered operational service in 2005. However, it origins stretched back three decades, to the mid-1970s when a series of technology and future requirements studies sorted through envisioned needs and potential capabilities to define the next “Advanced Tactical Fighter” (ATF). By 1980, these alternatives coalesced into four core attributes for the initial ATF program that became the F-22: short take-off and landing (STOL); stealth; supportability; and supercruise. It was on 20 July 1999, 20 years after it was defined and 25 years ago today, that the F-22 first successfully demonstrated the last of those features.
 
Chuck Yeager’s famous 1947 flight in the rocket-powered Bell X-1 was the first time a piloted aircraft “broke the sound barrier,” though it wasn’t until the 1950s that aircraft with jet engines could exceed the speed of sound (Mach 1) in regular, level flight. Even then, that capability took the use of an afterburner (or augmenter) that sprayed fuel directly into the exhaust stream for a boost of speed that was both temporary and fuel hungry. Later aircraft that could sustain supersonic speeds without an afterburner—“supercruise”—were either large like the Concorde or used unique engines like the SR-71, neither of which were relevant for tactical fighters. True supercruise could enable a fighter to reach a battlespace faster and from farther away and be more survivable once there, but that first required significant technology investment and transition.
 
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Air Force Aero Propulsion Lab (now the AFRL Aerospace Systems Directorate) focused its research and development with industry on radically improving the capabilities of turbine engines, with significant improvements in thrust-to-weight ratios, specific fuel consumption, operating life, and internal temperatures. Part of this work paid off in the General Electric F110 and Pratt & Whitney F100 engines that powered the F-15 and F-16 fleets, but the potential for even greater performance for a next-generation engine was evident. That research coincided with the start of the ATF acquisition program in 1981, along with its related ATF Engine (ATFE) program. Unlike with the F100 and F110 engines, the Systems Center program office (under the predecessor for what’s now the AFLCMC Propulsion Directorate) worked intimately with the Aero Propulsion Lab in directing ATFE development with the two contractors, from improving critical components to testing full-scale engine demonstrators. Both Pratt and GE’s resulting powerplants were used during the ATF “fly-off” between the YF-22 and Northrop’s YF-23, but Lockheed’s airframe and P&W’s YF119 engine won the competition in 1991.
 
The F-22’s subsequent acquisition straddled the end of the Cold War and notably went through resulting perturbations that delayed it well beyond initial plans. The engine development program was not immune from problems, but on 10 October 1998 a pair of F119 engines propelled F-22 AV-4001 to supersonic speeds for the first time. Then, on 20 July 1999, the same aircraft hit its first supercruise mile-stone, flying at Mach 1.5 for a sustained period of time without afterburner. The pilot? Colonel Clyde D. Moore who became the first commander of AFLCMC in 2012.