AMC To Industry: Integration Needed For Connectivity Push

GRAPEVINE, Texas—U.S. Air Force leaders say the service’s mobility fleet of tankers and airlifters need to become more connected to each other, though the Air Force has had trouble meeting the funding goals it wants—and is urging companies to think differently about how it could provide the capabilities.

The service’s Air Mobility Command (AMC) had outlined a plan called “25 by ’25,” a goal to have 25% of its fleet outfitted with new connectivity systems by next year. AMC will fall short of that overall goal as it has not been able to get enough money, though there has been a small number of new systems purchased to improve the fleet’s situational awareness.

The goal has changed how the Pentagon is prioritizing the connectivity, and more funding is expected. AMC commander Gen. John Lamontagne tells Aviation Week that the command is talking with headquarters on resource challenges and ways to prioritize spending as the Pentagon is crafting its fiscal 2027 budget request. This will be especially important as future programs, such as the Next Generation Aerial Refueling System, face uncertainty.

Brig. Gen. Corey Simmons, AMC’s director of strategy, plans, requirements and programs, says companies can help the command with its goal by focusing more on integrating different systems as opposed to selling individual antennas, computers or other equipment.

For example, Simmons says the overall push for connectivity can be broken down into seven specific components: having “someone to talk to” on the aircraft—such as an operations center, a satellite connection, physical antennas on an aircraft, new cables or piping on aircraft to connect those antennas, computers to process the information, a display to show this information to aircrew, and an overall subscription to keep the connection active—akin to a data plan.

“This is not easy. It is not as easy as saying we’re going to put connectivity on an airplane. This is a really hard problem,” Simmons said during a presentation at the Airlift/Tanker Association conference here on Nov. 1. “And what I told industry ... is that industry right now is really good at solving one or two of these problems.”

But the Air Force is not good at integrating individual components that it buys from multiple vendors, he said.

“That is not what we’re good at. Industry is insanely good at it. They’re really good at being able to put this together,” he says. “Let them integrate it. Let us become a user.”

To date, connectivity efforts on AMC aircraft have included small numbers of roll-on equipment or easily installed systems such as the Borsight and Collins Aerospace Real-Time Information in the Cockpit. The system is a data link and display first developed for Boeing KC-135s that is now on a few Lockheed C-130s and Boeing C-17s. Sierra Nevada Company’s Airlift/Tanker Open Mission Systems kit has been demonstrated for beyond-line-of-sight data using existing antennas. The service is considering other programs that could require hardware changes to aircraft, such as the Multi-Orbit Hardware Adoptable Wideband Kit (Mohawk), which would include a new payload fairing on top of a KC-135 with space and interfaces to multiple antennas, such as SpaceX’s Starlink.

But the funding needed for broader adoption has been a hard sell within the Air Force, where the broader Department of the Air Force Battle Network program is moving ahead to use satellite communications first for combat aircraft. AMC officials say near-term efforts such as the Airlift Tanker Open Mission Systems (ATOMS) or Mohawk could help bridge the gap to future Department of Air Force (DAF) Battle Network adoption on the fleet.