Apparently when Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne told Congress last month that the Air Force expected to award the combat search and rescue helicopter replacement program contract—for a second time—in February, he didn’t have the latest information. Jim Wolf of Reuters reports that Air Force spokeswoman Lt. Col. Jennifer Cassidy said this week that the award would not come before summer. Wolf could not get Cassidy or anyone else to say why the new delay. The Air Force initially awarded the CSAR-X contract to Boeing, but two protests later, the service has started from scratch.
The Air Force awarded a $13.08 billion contract to the Sierra Nevada Corporation on April 26 for its Survivable Airborne Operations Center aircraft, the successor to the service’s E-4B “Doomsday” plane. Like the E-4B, officially called the National Airborne Operations Center, the SAOC will be meant to withstand a nuclear attack and keep…