Boeing might put a drone operator in the F-15EX’s back seat

FARNBOROUGH, UK—“Talk to me, Goose—about our robot wingmen,” Maverick might say, if he were flying the F-15EX fighter jet, and if Boeing can sync up with the Air Force’s plans for collaborative combat aircraft. 

“As these missions become more and more complicated, going into the future, there’s probably a play to have some sort of role in the backseat, I think there’s a role in manned-unmanned teaming, loyal wingman-type stuff, where the mission gets very, very complicated,” Boeing test pilot Matt “Phat” Giese told reporters Tuesday at Farnborough. 

The two-seater jet can be flown “really easily” with just one pilot, but new missions could require another set of eyeballs to manage “other things” in the formation, Giese said. The Air Force is in the process of buying new drones called collaborative combat aircraft to accompany fighter jets into combat. 

“In all the conversations with the customers, the one thing I get the most is the excitement that there’s a second seat to do something,” said Rob Novotny, director of business development for Boeing’s fighter jets.

The first unit getting Boeing’s F-15EXs is a traditional, single-seat F-15C squadron in the Air National Guard, Novotny said, and the squadron will explore exactly what the back seater can do—whether that additional person is a traditional weapons system operator, or an operator “holding targets at risk thousands and thousands of miles away, facilitating an ABMS/JADC2 node.” 

Boeing is pitching the modernized version of the decades-old jetF-15 to international customers as the Air Force tries to convince Congress to let it cut its planned purchase of EXs from 144 to 98.

The F-15EX program is “challenging” because the government is waffling on how many it’s going to purchase, Novotny said, and Boeing can’t charge less per plane unless orders go up. iIn production lots 2 through 4, the F-15EX cost about $90 million a jet, not far off the price of a fifth-generation F-35.   

Boeing is accelerating production to two jets per month by the end of next year, and it’s “going to stabilize there unless we have some overwhelming demand signal,” Novotny said. “For example, if I am able to find a few more of these foreign customers and maybe a bigger USAF buy, that would drive another conversation about the rate increase.”

The Air Force had planned to send most of its F-15EXs to the Air National Guard for homeland defense missions to replace F-15C and Ds, but with the new radar and electronic warfare system, “the thinking on this has completely flipped,” Novotny said. Now the service is sending it to fight in the “toughest spots in the world,” he said, such as Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan.

Novotny also noted that several pairs of F-15Es helped shoot down the barrages of drones and cruise missiles Iran launched at Israel in April, taking down about 70 Shahed UAVs. Those jets weren’t the newest model, but they were equipped with the new radar that is being put on the EXs, he said.