Boeing
has announced that F-15E1, the company’s F-15 Silent Eagle flight demonstrator aircraft, successfully completed its maiden flight test on July 8 from Lambert airport in St. Louis. During the 80-minute, Boeing F-15 chief test pilot Dan Draeger opened and closed the aircraft’s left-side conformal weapons bay, which held an instrumented AIM-120 test missile. The missile was not launched. ‘This flawless flight allows us to move into the next phase. In the next couple of weeks, we will ferry F-15E1 to the test range and launch an AIM-120,” said Brad Jones, Boeing’s director for F-15 development programs. The Silent Eagle design incorporates features to reduce the F-15’s radar cross section, along with the CWBs for air-to-air and air-to-ground munitions, and canted tail fins. Boeing says it is pursuing this variant for the international market.
In the face of Chinese war plans to disrupt U.S. command-and-control networks in the event of a conflict, the Air Force needs to focus less on its “connect everything” efforts and prepare its combat aviators to fight without a constant connection to higher-ups, according to a new report from AFA’s…
