For its part, the Air Force is pursuing a new long-range strike platform, which Michael Wynne, Secretary of the Air Force, said could be manned or unmanned, but he leans toward the latter. “I’m a huge unmanned vehicle proponent,” he said at a Capitol Hill seminar Wednesday. He maintained that the Air Force would continue to make a heavy investment in unmanned vehicles, because they solve a key issue—endurance in the target area. A single-seat manned aircraft can last 11 hours, tops, while a Global Hawk can persist for more than 24 hours.
Today’s armament maintainers are tasked with performing flightline (O-Level) maintenance with an assortment of legacy test sets that greatly limit the ability to quickly and efficiently verify armament system readiness, diagnose failures, and ultimately return the aircraft to full mission...