Workers stand near KC-46A Pegasus aerial refueling jets at Boeing's airplane production facility in Everett, Washington, in 2021. David Ryder/Getty Images
Air Force waits for tankers in wake of Boeing strike
Workers voted Monday night to resume work, but there’s no word yet on when KC-46 production might resume.
Six weeks into the new fiscal year, Boeing has yet to deliver any of the 15 KC-46 tankers it owes the service by next September.
Service officials did not say when they expect the deliveries, which were disrupted by a recently concluded seven-week strike, but said they expect the company to hew to its contract.
Thus far, “no KC-46s have been delivered in FY 25,” an Air Force spokesperson said.
The final tanker of fiscal 2024 was delivered on Sept. 27, completed check-outs, and was ferried to an operational unit on Oct. 4, the spokesperson said.
Tanker production was stalled when thousands of Boeing workers went on strike in September. After weeks of negotiations, union workers voted on Monday to end the strike, clearing the company to restart aircraft production on lines that build commercially derived military aircraft such as the 767-based tanker and the Navy’s 737-based P-8 maritime aircraft. Some employees could resume work as early as this week, but the company said production might not restart for weeks.
The strike hit Boeing’s finances in the third quarter and contributed to $6 billion in losses, including $2 billion on the defense side.
A Boeing spokesperson, asked about the company’s timeline to restart production and deliveries of KC-46s, said, “We’ll have more to share in the coming days.”
As Air Force units wait for tankers to arrive, service officials said this week that they may extend the KC-46 program two years beyond initial projections, to 2031, after repeated pauses on deliveries. Schedules have also slipped for several key fixes for the tanker, which has been plagued with development problems. Those problems have already caused the company to lose more than $8 billion on the program, and new challenges with the tanker are still popping up.
It’s unclear when Boeing’s fixed-price contracts will start to bring in profits, but in the meantime, the company has said it will try to improve its numbers by “doing less” and cutting non-core defense programs, possibly its space business.
“I think that we're better off doing less and doing it better than doing more and not doing it well, so we're in the process of taking an evaluation of the portfolio,” Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg told investors in October.
The company also announced in October that it would cut 10 percent of its workforce, roughly 17,000 people, in order to “position” itself for the future.