You can pick up the CNN story here if you want to, but the
basic idea is that Textron (the company that makes, among other things, Cessna
airplanes and E-Z Go golf carts) has teamed up with a small company called
AirLand Enterprises (which was founded for this purpose) to create a low-cost,
relatively low-speed military aircraft specifically intended for Air National
Guard and other lower-intensity combat settings. According to the joint venture’s
website, the airplane, called the Scorpion, is ideally suited for “…irregular
warfare, border patrol, maritime surveillance, emergency relief, counter-narcotics
and air defense operations," all things traditionally done by all-up
strike-fighter and fighter-bomber types like the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-16
Falcon at much higher costs – but which don’t have to be…
Company figures indicate that the Scorpion will cost about
one-eighth as much to operate as an F-16 (about $3,000 per air hour compared
with $24,899 for the F-16); the aircraft is also expected to be much less
expensive to produce. The problem is that the U.S. Air Force did not request
such a vehicle, and has so far showed no interest in the program whatsoever. It’s
partly that the Air Force has committed itself to the F-35 Lightning II as an
eventual F-16 replacement, which hasn’t been easy given (unconfirmed) reports
that the F-35 can’t fly in bad weather, can’t hover or handle short runways, and
so on. But it must also be noted that the US military has had a long history of
ambivalence towards airplanes of any sort that aren’t sleek, photogenic,
futuristic, and generally pointy – even when such types are not suited to the
mission at hand…
To take the obvious case, much of the Air Force leadership
never really warmed up to the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack craft, affectionately
known as the Warthog to most of the people who have flown one. Despite the
airplane’s extraordinary success in both Gulf Wars, the Air Force has been
trying to phase it out almost since the lumbering, unglamorous – but supremely
effective – air-to-ground platform first came on-line. The Navy had similar
problems with the “drumstick-shaped” A-6 Intruder, which has now been replaced
with sleek, supersonic (and pointy) F/A-18 Hornet types. Three generations of
pilots have complained that it is almost impossible to fly effective close air
support missions in a machine optimized for twice the speed of sound, but three
generations of politicians could tell you for a certainty that such a task is
still easier than trying to get funding for a new weapons system that isn’t
either eye-catching or loaded with useless pork (or often both) through
Congress…
The future of the Scorpion project is still up in the air as
of this writing. Of course, Textron doesn’t have the prototype ready for trials
yet, so perhaps things will be different once they can demonstrate the aircraft’s
performance in person. But with no requests for the product – and as yet, no
interest in the prototype – this is going to be a hard sell. I’m hoping that
the Scorpion receives at least some support, and that the company is able to
sell enough of them to at least prove the concept. In the long run, we need the
capabilities that this vehicle is supposed to have, and we need the economy of
operation that the design promises the end user, but the most important aspect
of the whole project may turn out to be proving that entrepreneurship isn’t
dead in the aircraft industry, that new airplanes don’t have to cost hundreds
of billions of dollars to design or take twenty years to get ready, and that
the U.S. military can still recognize a good idea they didn’t ask for, even if
it isn’t pointy…
Because if any of those things is no longer true, I’m pretty
sure we’ve got a bigger problem…
No comments:
Post a Comment