Air Mobility Command announced Friday the Pegasus has been approved to refuel all F-15 Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon variants during TRANSCOM-tasked missions under its third interim capability release approval.

The Air Force previously used the Pegasus’ boom to refuel F-15s and F-16s during non-TRANSCOM missions such as testing and training flights, AMC spokesman Col. Damien Pickart said. Those jets do not use drogue systems to refuel.

But this approval will allow the Pegasus to take on more missions the Air Force otherwise would have had to hand off to the KC-135 Stratotanker and KC-10 Extender and lessen the burden on those older tankers, AMC said in a release.

“The KC-46 can now support 62 percent of all receiver aircraft that request air refueling support from USTRANSCOM,” said Brig. Gen. Ryan Samuelson, who is in charge of the KC-46 cross functional team, in the announcement. “This step forward accelerates the critical projection and connection warfighting requirements the Pegasus brings to the joint force, even before it’s fully operational.”

AMC Commander Gen. Mike Minihan on Wednesday signed off on the KC-46′s latest approval.

AMC last hit such a milestone in August, when the KC-46 was approved to refuel the B-52 Stratofortress, C-17 Globemaster and other Pegasus aircraft using its refueling boom.

And the first interim capability release decision in July cleared the Pegasus to refuel aircraft using its centerline drogue system.

The Air Force said it will continue to roll out additional expansions of the Pegasus’ capabilities as its ICR process unfolds, though it would not say how long it might take. The plan focuses on “establishing incremental confidence measures” that allow AMC’s commander and other senior leaders to assess how the Pegasus is doing.

The Pegasus has so far carried out more than 6,000 missions since January 2019. Over that period, it has refueled aircraft with more than 35 million pounds of fuel, and made about 26,000 boom and 1,500 drogue contacts with other aircraft.

The Pegasus has been working to resolve a series of technical problems throughout its troubled rollout. As of August, the aircraft had six Category 1 deficiencies, though the Air Force said it is working with Boeing to resolve some of these issues.

“We’ve certainly got a lot to learn with you,” Branson told the audience during a Q&A session with Gen. Maryanne Miller, the commander of Air Mobility Command.

Branson, the world-renowned entrepreneur and private space pioneer, was in attendance to discuss ways to increase innovation within the air mobility force.

“We’re speaking with your company and I think there’s lot of opportunity, so we’ll keep the dialog open,” Miller said. “There’s very fertile ground there.”

Earlier in the symposium, Miller had confirmed the Air Force was in talks with Virgin Orbit and other space companies, like Blue Origin and SpaceX, but that no resources were being committed as of yet.

“We’re continuing, our [planning] community is going to continue to have discussions with the space companies, and we have agreed to just sit with them and just stay up to date with where they’re going with their future plans, to just be at the table with them” she said in a Friday roundtable with reporters. “We won’t commit any resources, but we’ve committed to work with them to see how quickly they progress through that.”

The idea of space cargo operations isn’t necessarily new to AMC, as the organization’s former commander, Gen. Carlton Everhart, floated the idea in August during a Defense Writers Group breakfast.

“Think about this. Thirty minutes, 150 metric tons [and] less than the cost of a C-5,” he speculated at the time.

But there are concrete signs the military is considering the idea. On Oct. 19, the U.S. Transportation Command asked commercial space companies to join collaborative studies on “Responsive Spacelift Supporting Department of Defense Mobility Operations.”

The solicitation asked for companies to provide several pieces of information, including projections of future capabilities, affordability estimates, types of operations that could use spacelift and how long it would take to move cargo around the globe in real-world scenarios.

It also asks for possible launch facility locations, business plans and how to protect cargo against various threats, like cyber or electromagnetic countermeasures.

While nothing resembling a commitment came of Branson’s remarks, he did leave airmen with one particular message.

“Screw it, just do it,” he proclaimed to laughter and applause.

“We’ve always understood the capability of that tanker to pass information back and forth, and we know that that works, and we know that node can be tankers spread out from the place we took off from and the place we are operating,” Holmes said in response to an audience question at the 2018 Airlift Tanker Association symposium outside Dallas, Texas. “So I think its fantastic, and I’m all for it.”

In September, Rockwell Collins announced they had been contracted to provide 1950s-era KC-135R aircraft with the Real Time Information in the Cockpit system, which would provide those tankers with a connection to Link 16, the service’s primary data link, for the first time.

“Pilots and boom operators will now be able to view intelligence feeds on the new avionics displays we’re providing as part of their Block 45 upgrade,” said Dave Schreck, Rockwell Collins’s vice president and general manager for airborne solutions, said in a release at the time. “With information such as enemy threats, target data, and blue force locations at their fingertips, crews will gain real-time situational awareness to more effectively carry out their missions.”

Under Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein, the service has been working to find a way to link aircraft and sensors on a network to enhance awareness in combat operations. Goldfein, who has flown on the Air Force’s next tanker, the long-delayed Boeing KC-46 Pegasus, said flying the aircraft was about more than controlling the stick.

“I strapped on this node in a network that has that computing capacity to connect,” he described in a roundtable with reporters at the symposium.

Holmes also lauded the KC-46′s capabilities, which include the Link 16 data link, among other systems.

“I’m excited about the KC-46′s communications abilities, I think its a great idea to bring those capabilities into the rest of the tanker fleet,” he said. “It’ll help us not just push airplanes, but it will be able to bring information back and forth.”

And when it comes to the larger, Air Force-wide network, Holmes said the service has “done enough talking” about the future network architecture, adding: “It’s time to take a step and decide what that way forward will be and what that architecture will be.”

“When you look at our future ISR and command systems, Will Roper, our senior acquisition official, is going to take a new look at what we’re going to do to replace the capability that’s been done by JSTARS, and he’s going to start with an architect instead of a program office,” Holmes said. “The architect’s job is to design the network that we will operate under, and so we can make sure that the pieces work in that effort, and instead of doing what we’ve done in the past, which is design a bunch of pieces each with its own communications capability, and try to figure out how to put them together after its too late.”

However, he added a caveat: “Like all our great ideas, we have to find the money for it in a budget that doesn’t have enough to go around.”

The program is also meant to improve aircraft mission capability and availability.

“The bottom line is to get to where we are scheduling all of our maintenance, rather than reacting to the maintenance,” Brig. Gen. Steven Blaymaier, who oversees Air Mobility Command’s logistics, engineering and force protection, said in an interview at the 2018 Airlift Tanker Association symposium outside Dallas, Texas. “We want our units to achieve their mission-capable rates on a sustained basis.”

According to the latest available data, from fiscal 2017, the KC-135 fleet had, on average, a 74 percent mission-capable rate, and the C-130J fleet had a 77 percent mission-capable rate.

As for the rest of the mobility fleet, by that same data, the C-5M fleet stood at 60 percent, the C-130H fleet was at 73 percent and the C-17 fleet was at 84 percent mission capable.

The concept, known as conditions-based maintenance, has already rolled out to the C-5 fleet within AMC and to the B-1 fleet in Global Strike Command. The program uses algorithms based on reams of data to create models that predict when a part might break, rather than waiting for it to fail. It’s a standard practice in the commercial aviation industry that is now making its way into the Air Force.

Blaymaier said the KC-135 fleet will join the program in spring of 2019, and the C-130J fleet will follow in the summer. He added that the other aircraft in AMC’s fleet, such as the C-17 and KC-10, will eventually join the program.

“They’re all in work at their program offices right now,” he said. “What we learn from C-5 will be incorporated into the other aircraft.”

Blaymaier noted that the Air Force is modeling its effort after Delta Air Lines’ TechOps division’s procedures, and that the service was at the beginning, or “crawl stage,” of the process. He also said that Delta Air Lines took eight years to achieve the results it wanted, something the Air Force is working toward.

In September, Lt. Gen. Robert McMurray, commander of the Air Force Sustainment Center, told Defense News that the conditions-based maintenance program was critical to increasing the readiness of the Air Force’s aircraft.

“Given the aging fleet situation that we have, we probably need to be using data better to take care of it — which is a drive toward what most everyone right now is saying is the right way to manage fleet sustainment, which is through condition-based maintenance and data analytics,” he said at the time.

Another benefit Blaymaier described was that the service will be able to track maintenance needs by individual aircraft, rather than by a general fleetwide standard. That could reduce time in depots and increase mission-capable rates, a top priority of senior Pentagon leaders.

“As we move forward with conditions-based maintenance plus, [or CBM+], and predictive analytics, we’ll be able to know by tail number which parts are going to fail on certain aircraft,” he said. “It’ll be much more surgical [and] operational.”

Blaymaier added that while the transition to conditions-based maintenance might be a long journey, it would lead to huge benefits for the Air Force.

“Ultimately we want to achieve those aircraft availability standards that we established for each of our fleets that are required to meet our wartime taskings,” he said.

“If you’re interested out there — and I know some are — if you want to send me a note and what you think about that, I’m considering that,” Holmes said in response to an audience question at the Airlift Tanker Association’s annual symposium outside Dallas, Texas. “I’m open to the idea, I just have to make the math work. “

But the ACC commander is skeptical since the training time it would take to transition a pilot from flying mobility aircraft to fighters or bombers is about the same for newly trained pilots to learn how to fly them in the first place.

“To go through [an] introduction to fighter fundamentals course, and then to go to a long course — either a long transition course or a course that initial students go through — it’s about the same amount of training it takes to train a lieutenant,” he said. “That lieutenant’s going to give me 10 years of return on that investment. And the older people are that I bring over, the less return I’m going to get on that investment.”

Holmes said pilots at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma showed interest in adding to their service commitments if it meant they could fly combat aircraft. But, he added, he was unsure about that approach.

“It’s counter to the way we’re going. You saw in the past week the Air Force has eliminated most of the active-duty service commitments for cross-training,” he said. “We don’t want you to say no to that training, to feel like it’s trapping you.”

His remarks come as the Air Force is looking to increase the number of pilots it trains per year from about 1,300 in fiscal 2019 to 1,500 in fiscal 2022. The service is also working on a “flying-only” technical track for pilots that cuts non-flying duties.

While Holmes seemed skeptical of the idea during his answer at A/TA, he did say he wanted motivated pilots, regardless of where they come from.

“Ultimately, though, I’m of the mindset that I want people that are dying to be someplace and they’re really eager and determined to do something,” he said.

The service’s expansion plan, which was named “The Air Force We Need” and unveiled this September, called for one airlift squadron and 14 tanker squadrons to be added by 2030.

At the time, service leaders from Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson to AMC Commander Gen. Maryanne Miller, said more work would need to be done in order to determine the mix of aircraft needed to get to the 386 squadron goal, which is 74 more than the service has now.

But now, AMC has a better idea of what it could require, Miller told reporters during an Oct. 26 roundtable.

The analysis from “The Air Force We Need” supports adding three new C-17 Globemaster III squadrons and cutting two C-130 Hercules squadrons from the airlift inventory, she said. That would bring the total number of airlift squadrons up to 54, an increase of one squadron.

Read more from the Airlift/Tanker Association conference!

But Boeing’s C-17 production line in Long Beach, California is dead, with the company having manufactured the final Globemaster in 2015. Increasing the number of C-17s could entail restarting the production line — an expensive proposition for any aircraft — but Miller said the Air Force had not yet begun discussing the possibility with Boeing.

“Those are the details that we have not looked at,” Miller said.

“That will be the next discussion as we proceed, talking with Congress and working with Congress, because the same would apply for the tanker fleet,” she said. “An additional 14 squadrons by 2030 — what would be the path to get there? Something we’re looking at, but again, this is just the initial stages of talking with Congress and getting this concept out there.”

It’s unclear what other options would exist to increase the number of C-17 squadrons aside from restarting the production line. The U.S. Air Force currently operates 222 C-17s, but began retiring some of the oldest Globemaster IIIs in 2012. It may be possible that those C-17s could be taken out of storage and revitalized.

A spokeswoman for Boeing had no comment.

Miller stressed that discussions about the makeup of the future airlift fleet are still in the beginning stages, and will be informed not only by Congress but also by an ongoing AMC study.

That Mobility Capabilities Requirements Study is slated to be delivered to Capitol Hill in a couple of months, and may have different recommendations than the “Air Force We Need” analysis on how many airlift squadrons are needed, and of what aircraft models.

“The two studies took slightly different approaches to that,” she said. “The results of each of those studies will be reviewed and I think there will be a combination somewhere in there to try to validate the results of those studies put together.”

“When the calendar day arrives that we accept that aircraft, we will then begin the process that we’ve been planning for for a while. It means we just begin to execute the [initial operational test and evaluation] at that point,” Gen. Maryanne Miller, the commander of Air Mobility Command, said in a roundtable with reporters at the 2018 Airlift/Tanker Symposium outside Dallas, Texas, on Friday.

“Its a familiarization that we will do, and its a whole series of a few months, actually months of going through that, and right now our crews are going through, we’re training the first cadre,” Miller said, noting that the simulators at McConnell would be certified next week.

“So we are ready. We’re just waiting for the operational test people, and a way ahead on the solutions.”

Asked how long it will take before KC-46s can conduct operational missions, Miller said initial operating capability would likely occur a year after delivery — and full operational capability two years after delivery.

But all of this is dependent on getting the long-delayed tanker to the hands of airmen. The company was initially slated to start delivery of the tankers by August 2017. That was pushed to October 2018, a deadline the Air Force said last week will not be met.

And that’s still being worked out by the Air Force and Boeing. As of now, the aircraft has five category-1 deficiencies, including issues with the remote vision system, used to control refueling, and the boom.

“We’re trying to work with Boeing on what its plan is to rectify the deficiencies that have been identified so that we get a tanker as we’ve contracted to get,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said in an exclusive interview at the symposium.

The service plans to buy at least 179 of the aircraft, and because the contract is a fixed-price agreement, Boeing is responsible for any costs above the original $4.9 billion contract. In a third-quarter earnings call this week, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg said the company took a pretax charge of $179 million. That brings the total charges on the program to approximately $3.5 billion.

When asked about that number, Wilson said the Air Force’s stance is that these repercussions are part of the process.

“They made a bid, we gave them a spec; they made a bid, and they need to provide the piece of equipment they said they were going to do. We didn’t change any of the requirements, and Boeing owes a piece of equipment that’s to spec,” Wilson said in the interview.

In that earnings call this week, Muilenberg said the company was committed to delivering the tanker this year.

“We continue to make steady progress toward final certification of the KC-46 tanker,” Muilenburg explained. “We are working with our U.S. Air Force customer toward completing all the steps required to deliver the first tanker aircraft this quarter.”

“It really is a day-to-day discussion between the program office and Boeing, and they update me every week,” Miller said, when asked about the delivery timeline. “They continue to test every day on those deficiencies, and they work on a day-to-day basis to get after those solutions.”

Boeing also confirmed this week that it completed certifications to allow the KC-46 to refuel F/A-18 and B-52 aircraft, and the company will begin F-15 certification next week.

“I don’t know how it will affect mobility, but most of you know space affects mobility every day,” Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday at the 2018 Airlift/Tanker Symposium outside Dallas, Texas.

“Whatever the Space Force is or does, it has to protect our national interest in space,” he said, adding that GPS is critical to the air mobility community.

As for what space cargo operations could look like, the previous head of Air Mobility Command, Gen. Carlton Everhart, espoused the possibility of moving cargo using rockets during a Defense Writers Group breakfast in August.

“Think about this. Thirty minutes, 150 metric tons [and] less than the cost of a C-5,” he said at the time.

Apart from cargo operations, such a focuses space presence could help with pre-positioning equipment and supplies in orbit, ready to be dropped to Earth.

But in a roundtable with reporters Friday, the new commander of AMC, Gen. Maryanne Miller, said while the command continues to study the possibility, space cargo operations remain at the conceptual stage.

“We’re continuing, our [planning] community is going to continue to have discussions with the space companies, and we have agreed to just sit with them and just stay up to date with where they’re going with their future plans, to just be at the table with them” she said. “We won’t commit any resources, but we’ve committed to work with them to see how quickly they progress through that.”

One potential would be SpaceX’s next-generation reusable BFR rocket, currently under development. During the roundtable, Miller confirmed that the Air Force had spoken to SpaceX about the idea.

“They have talked about moving cargo in space, and we’ve sat down with SpaceX and had that discussion. But it’s really just discussion at this point,” she said. “Our connection with space is really just going to be at the table with them, to look at how much progress they’re making.”

As for what type of cargo could possibly be moved, that’s still being discussed. But in August, Everhart said he’d be willing to stick “anything” in space.

The plan’s submission was confirmed by Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson, who laid out some details in an exclusive interview at the Airlift Tanker Association’s annual symposium outside Dallas.

Mattis set the level in a Sept. 17 memo, first obtained by Defense News, that ordered the Air Force and Navy to get mission-capable rates for F-22, F-35, F/A-18 and F-16 fighters to 80 percent by the end of 2019, a significant increase from where they were when those figures were last released to the public.

According to the Air Force data for fiscal 2017, released in March, the F-16C fleet reported a mission-capable rate of 70.22 percent, the F-35A fleet reported 54.67 percent and the F-22A reported a low rate of 49.01 percent.

As for what’s in the Air Force’s plan, Wilson says it includes maintenance staffing, spare parts availability and overall logistics across the Air Force, as well as changes to some Air National Guard units.

“That includes plussing up our supply accounts, that includes making sure that we prioritize our maintainers for those particular fighter units,” she said in the interview. “That will mean shifting some money around in our budget, but we’ve put a plan together to do that.”

As for improvements to Air National Guard units, Wilson said the Air Force is both assigning new active-duty pilots and planning to add a second maintenance shift which she says could drive a sharp increase in mission-capable rates.

“If a jet comes in, and there’s something wrong with it and it needs maintenance, instead of sitting overnight, and then being not mission capable first thing in the morning, and then not being on capability for the rest of that day, we’ll actually have a second shift in maintenance,” Wilson said. “The maintainers are there working on it overnight, so you can significantly increase your mission-capable rates.”

Adding the active duty pilots could also increase mission-capable rates as they are able to fly more than Guard pilots, meaning aircraft assigned to those squadrons could fly more. Wilson explained that those pilots, who are some of the newest in the Air Force, will gain valuable leadership experience — and a lot of flight hours.

“Its a way of seasoning them and getting them a lot of flying time and a lot of senior mentoring very quickly,” she said.

In an interview at Lockheed Martin’s production facility for F-35s in Fort Worth, Bruce Litchfield, the vice president of sustainment operations for the company’s aeronautics division, said the company, the prime contractor for F-16s, F-35s and F-22s, was looking forward to supporting the Air Force in increasing mission-capable rates.

“Sustainment is not rocket science, but its really hard and complex. You have to bring a whole bunch of things together. Engineering, tech data, support equipment, availability of new and improved tools to the field,” he said. “We’re really looking at this one as a systems engineering process, and we’re working across our full envelope of weapons systems.”

This story was updated to reflect an accurate transcript of Bruce Litchfield’s interview.

“This plan will accelerate readiness recovery of those units by six years. This is the difference between focussing our resources on where it matters most and peanut butter spreading readiness money we’ve received across the entire workforce at the same time”, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told the audience at the Airlift Tanker Association’s annual symposium outside Dallas.

“We have to reorient ourselves, our readiness, our presentation of forces, our training, to be prepared for the great power competition we face. And if we are there, the likelihood that we will have to fight will go down”, she went on to say.

As for what 204 units are being prioritized, Wilson said they were units that are “most relevant to the high-end fight”, and that the remaining 108 of the service’s 312 squadrons would reach the readiness goal by 2023. It is likely those units will include the Air Force’s fourth and fifth-generation fighter, bomber, and C4ISR squadrons.

While Wilson did not identify in her speech exactly which units were selected for readiness improvements, she did say that the Air Force had perhaps become too “used to” low readiness, mostly due to budget issues.

“Years of shortages of parts and budgets that were inadequate, I think have made us a little bit accepting, perhaps too accepting and complacent. We’ve come to think that maybe its OK to have mission capable rates that are constrained by what we can afford. Its not. It is not OK”, she said.

Wilson added that as maintenance funds go up, the Air Force has to change their attitude towards readiness, and that it would be a team effort across the service.

“All of us have to find a pathway back from crowdsourcing and cannibalizing the United States Air Force located here in the continental United States and rolling forward 10 or 20 percent of our people in onesies and twosies onto mature infrastructure in the Middle East, to fight with exquisite command and control in a place where we have air superiority.”

It’s important to note that funding increases are dependent on whether or not the Air Force stays funded at the level it is in FY2019. On Oct. 20, President Trump said the Pentagon’s 2020 budget would “probably” be $700 billion, as part of a plan to cut the spending at all federal departments by 5 percent. However, depending on which party controls Congress, that number could go up or down.