Bomber would provide stealth and supercruise, but Lockheed Martin fully expects to encounter some competition
Lockheed Martin is proposing the FB-22 - a bomber derivative of the F/A-22 - as one of several solutions on offer to meet the US Air Force's potential long-range bomber requirement, says the company's executive vice-president Dain Hancock.
The FB-22 would give the USAF stealth and supercruise, but Hancock emphasises there is no contract yet and there probably will be other contenders. "I fully expect there will be some kind of competition," he said, speaking at Asian Aerospace.
Lockheed Martin has given the USAF a range of estimated development costs for the new variant.
"The USAF and the US Department of Defense continues to show interest in a long-range bomber aircraft sometime in the future," Hancock says. "[But] a programme has not materalised yet."
Boeing senior vice-president and general manager of air force systems George Muellner says his company also has had "dialogue" with the USAF on a potential FB-22, but he has "no sense where that will go". Boeing is a major F/A-22 programme partner. Muellner says the USAF is more focused on adding a network capability to its bombers, in particular B-1s and B-52s.
The USAF already has a contract to buy 50 F/A-22s, 23 of which have already been delivered, and Lockheed Martin forecasts a total purchase of 270, excluding any impact from a potential bomber variant.
"We've got a production line in front of us that's quite stable between 20 and 30 aircraft a year," Muellner says.
Source: Flight International