Naftaly Mwaniki

PARIS — A top Boeing executive said the company is proceeding with work on a contract to build two new Air Force One jets amid a pending deal by President Donald Trump to accept a donated jet for the mission from Qatar.
Stephen Parker, Boeing’s interim president and chief executive officer, told reporters at the Paris Air Show there had been “no impact at all” on the firm’s assignment of transforming a pair of 747-8 aircraft into VC-25B Air Force One planes.
At a press conference, Parker largely managed to sidestep the hot potato that is the controversial Qatari gift to Trump, saying Boeing was instead “laser focused” on achieving the requisite safety and other certifications of the two aircraft for which the company is on the hook.
Trump’s surprise focus on using a Qatari-donated jet for the presidential transport aircraft has sparked multiple controversies, including concerns about the feasibility of quickly adapting it for presidential use, its co..

PARIS — European NATO countries are eyeing drones for airborne electromagnetic-warfare operations including radar jamming, a skill many of the continent’s air forces are currently lacking.
Italy’s Leonardo says between ten and twenty NATO countries have expressed interest in a capability similar to the StormShroud radar-jammer drone it provided to the U.K.
Leonardo has taken a lead in radar-jamming drones with StormShroud, built around the company’s BriteStorm jammer on an unmanned aerial system from Portugal’s Tekever. U.S., European and Israeli rivals will be presenting some of their airborne electronic warfare offerings at the Paris Air Show starting here on Monday.
Europe largely depends on the U.S. for airborne electromagnetic warfare, a gap some countries are looking to address amid uncertainty about American commitment to the continent. Meanwhile, an aggressive Russia has been expanding capabilities based on its experience in Ukraine, where drones are omni-pres..

ROME — The Italian Air Force has formally entered into service a new basic jet trainer, the Leonardo M-345, which will operate alongside the firm’s better known M-346 advanced trainer.
The M-345 entered service on Thursday at a ceremony at the Air Force’s 61st Wing at Galatina air base in southern Italy, where it will replace the long serving MB-339.
The Air Force said 18 aircraft have been ordered to date, with seven delivered and four involved in operational test and evaluation activities which wrapped up in March.
Four instructors are now trained, the Air Force said.
The jet encompasses phases 2 and 3 of flight training before pilots shift to flying the M-346 in phase 4.
“With the M-345 now integrated into the armed force’s training syllabus which already features the M-346 for the more advanced phases of training, the Italian Air Force will boast the most modern fixed-wing military training system in Europe,” said Stefano Bortoli, Leonardo Aerona..

The Air Force would cut its F-35A purchase for fiscal 2026 roughly in half under the White House’s draft defense budget.
The service typically buys about four dozen Joint Strike Fighters each year, with some years’ purchases topping 60. But a budget document obtained by Defense News shows the service would procure 24 F-35s next year, for a cost of nearly $4 billion.
That is less than the 44 F-35s, costing $4.8 billion, the Air Force is on track to buy this year, and the 51 jets worth $5.5 billion the service bought in 2024.
And while the number of jets the Air Force plans to buy would drop by 45% between 2025 and 2026, the savings would lag far behind. The cost of the F-35 purchases in 2026 would drop less than 18% over the 2025 cost, suggesting economies of scale would suffer from the reduced buy.
The slow emergence of budget documents and administration spending plans in this way is highly unusual, even for an administration in its first months. Proposed budgets for the u..

The Air Force has tested a new variation of its ship-killing Quicksink guided bomb to expand its options for taking out enemy vessels in a future war.
In a June 4 statement, the service said it dropped a 500-pound version of Quicksink, made from a GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, from a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber at Eglin Air Force Base’s Gulf Test Range off the coast of Florida. Previous Quicksink tests were conducted with 2,000-pound bombs.
Quicksink is the Air Force Research Laboratory’s effort to strengthen its ability to take out enemy ships. This capability would be particularly important in the event of a conflict with China over Taiwan, which would likely involve grueling fighting in the Pacific Ocean and require U.S. forces to destroy Chinese ships.
Previous tests used modified GBU-31 JDAMs to destroy target vessels. Those JDAMs are guided by GPS and use fins to steer towards the target as they fall.
AFRL previously said that it redesigned the JDAM&rsqu..

COLOGNE, Germany — Swedish warplane maker Saab and Germany-based Helsing sent a Gripen-E combat jet aloft in late May powered by an artificial-intelligence agent that took control of long-range flight maneuvers from the human pilot, the companies announced.
The series of three test flights above the Baltic Sea constitutes the first time that an AI application was in charge of real-world maneuvering, recommending missile shots at a Gripen training aircraft from a distance and evading disadvantageous flight paths that could turn dicey in a closer dogfight, executives told reporters in a June 10 call.
The integration of of Helsing’s Centaur AI pilot into the Gripen took merely six months and was made possible by the jet’s avionics architecture, which separates hardware and software elements for rapid integration of third-party capabilities, said Johan Segertoft, head of Saab’s Gripen business unit.
The combination of Gripen-E with Centaur is market-ready, according..

ROME — The under-development GCAP fighter and the newly launched American F-47 can be cogs in an integrated allied system of fighters and not competitors, a European official has said.
“The F-47 will be principally a U.S. fighter and not a competitor to the GCAP,” said Italian Air Force Gen. Giandomenico Taricco, who is working on the Anglo-Japanese-Italian GCAP program.
“What we want is for the GCAP to be interoperable with the F-47, to make them two elements in an integrated system,” said Taricco, who is commercial and corporate director at GIGO, the intergovernmental agency running the sixth-generation GCAP program.
The U.S. signaled its arrival in the sixth-generation market in March when President Donald Trump said Boeing would develop the F-47 which could be fielded by the end of the decade.
That would give it a head start on the GCAP plane, which is not expected to be delivered until 2035.
Trump reportedly discussed the F-47 with Japanese Prime Mini..

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday cast doubt on the future utility of airborne battle management aircraft, particularly the E-7 Wedgetail, and said space-based capabilities represent the future of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Hegseth’s skepticism of the E-7 and touting of space intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, may presage a split between the Pentagon’s top leadership and Air Force leaders and some lawmakers who feel that airborne assets are still the best option for managing battlefields.
The Air Force wants to buy 26 Boeing-made E-7s, which have been flown for years by Australia and are being bought by other nations such as the United Kingdom, to replace its fleet of aging E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system, or AWACS, planes. The AWACS, with its unmistakable massive radar dome high atop its fuselage, has been in service since the late 1970s, but is approaching the end of its life, and its capabilities are falling ..

After spending the better part of a decade transitioning outdated systems and infrastructure to the cloud, the Air Force agency responsible for providing key weather and environmental inputs for military and intelligence operations is starting to see a silver lining.
Air Force Weather started its digital transformation in 2017 amid a broader U.S. government push to migrate away from siloed data centers to more secure, efficient and capable could-based environments. As the Air Force’s largest special-purpose data processing node — crunching around 80 terabytes of data, or the equivalent of 6.6 billion pages of text, a day — the organization was a “big fat target” for cyber threats, according to Fred Fahlbusch, Air Force Weather’s data domain officer and chief of the weather resources, programs, data and cybersecurity division.
So, with fresh funding in hand, it began the process of migrating its operations from physical servers at the 557th Weather Wing at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebr..

The Air Force wants to revive its shelved AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon, or ARRW, hypersonic program — and perhaps move it into the procurement phase.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin told lawmakers in a hearing last week that the service wants to include funding for both ARRW and the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, or HACM, in the fiscal 2026 budget proposal.
“We are looking, and have in the budget submission — assuming it’s what we had put forward — two different [hypersonic] programs,” Allvin told the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday. “One is a larger form factor that is more strategic long-range that we have already tested several times. It’s called ARRW, and the other one is HACM.”
Hypersonic weapons are capable of traveling at more than five times the speed of sound and maneuvering midflight, making them harder to track and shoot down than conventional ballistic missiles and more capable of penetr..