Deep Intel on the F-15EX

all right joining me once again is our good friend Paco Benitez who is the man behind the merge newsletter so right up front let me say that if you are not subscribed to the merge and you're a fan of my channel you need to be so Paco today's subject is the F-15 ex so let's go back a couple years I remember I think it was the 2019 ndaa where all of a sudden the Air Force accounts are talking about a new version of the F-15 and I was like did I hear that right they're going to modify an airplane that's what 40 years old and you know go forward with this new idea and as a guy who is a tomcat guy you know another fourth gen airplane who and I've done a lot of 1v1s against Eagles over the years mostly C's I was like this is kind of an out there idea you know and and I thought it was maybe indicative of some programmatics gone awry so let's go way back and talk about where did this idea come from in the first place let's just say this that the Air Force is a service it plans to have what it's called Force design so it has a force structure and at one point the the vision of the Air Force that's had many of them but the main vision of the Air Force is today as we're standing here is they wanted 381 f-22s to escort 1763 f-35s that didn't happen so because of some politics and the timing the F-22 program was curtailed it started at 7 50. it got decremented down all the way to about 187. um what people don't realize is every time the F-22 program was decremented the F-15 force was extended by the same because it's a one for one replacement so the 750 Raptors were a one for one replacement for the f-15c and so when the F-22 program in about 2009 actually 2008 when it was decided they were going to curtail the program the Air Force put money into what was called the Golden Eagle program they're going to pick about 200 f-15s the best the best ones they have and they're going to modify them with new Esa Radars and some other stuff to let them fly out to 2030 and then eventually the F-35 program would assume all of those extra Force structure between the difference of the program so that was the that was the plan and that was about 2007 2008 time frame and so I tell you that story to tell you this story about 2017 they realized that that those f-15cs weren't going to make it to 2030. uh they were they're bent they're corroded they're there's all kinds of issues of Parts obsolescence parts that were supposed to break started breaking and so they started having operating limits on G's air speeds and usability just in general so the airplanes are old they are tired they need to be replaced the obvious solution is just buy more f-35s well based on a whole bunch of other things we can talk about in another episode about F-35 procurement production rate and upgrades to be the F-35 the Air Force wants in the 2030 fight that really wasn't a Time scope feasible so they started looking around what are the other options and the last F-15 the Air Force bot the U.S Air Force bot was in 2001 coincidentally there's a few countries that had been buying f-15s from Boeing through four material sales so there was an active production line and throughout that that time so call it 20 years or so those countries had been investing their own money into maturing the F-15 program with more upgrades and so it got new Motors it got new avionics it got some some other upgrades and so as the not the Air Force but as the Department of Defense started looking at this problem for the Air Force they quickly realized like hey if we as in the Department of Defense give you money that we were going to give the Navy to buy Super Hornets you can buy these f-15s and so there's a whole bunch of political uh stuff that Spilled Out in the media about the chief of staff and the secretary saying we didn't ask for these airplanes uh we'll take them but we didn't ask for them we don't want them and that was the the office of the Secretary of Defense basically making that decision for the Air Force and so that was kind of the political football where you heard kind of spill out was just contrary to everything the Air Force had been saying for years which is you know fifth gen or bust anything else is going to die as soon as it gets airborne and that's not true but those are those are some talking points and there's again there's history because the F-22 program got curtailed by so much there's a lot of scar tissue about that and then the B2 program got curtailed so much just like we talked about way back in that B21 episode so the F-35 is a is a really sensitive uh program for the Air Force and it's a it's a good program it's going to be awesome but they were afraid of countering some of those talking points you've mentioned the F-22 was not procured in the numbers with the original program of record that wasn't because it failed in test right it was just because it was an expensive airplane the unit FlyAway cost was high the threat was moving around during those years there was some argument about did we need a Ferrari when the air-to-air world is going away you know as we're doing these asymmetric threats in Iraq and Afghanistan a finite budget so we got to have money for the F-35 so we're going to go ahead like you said extend some of these f-15s to their full service life and then some and that'll kind of be the the thing that'll keep us on track for this F-35 so that sounds to me like the same logic behind reopening the Super Hornet line which we did a couple years ago to make our numbers because the f-35s were not proving on in test and we're not rolling off the line in accordance with the schedule so is that is that sort of a similar circumstance between what the Navy had to do and what the Air Forces had to do exactly that is the same in fact I want to say at this point the F-35 programmatically was like nine years behind schedule so basically a decade so we've we're over flying equipment a decade pass that we planned and that's that's kind of where all these problems start to manifest yep and plus the op Tempo has been high because of the post-9 11 conflicts so we've been flying our our Eagles a lot right I mean on the rampant Bagram all I saw were strike Eagles you know as far as the eye could see and they seem to be taking off all the time while I was there so you mentioned foreign military sales the country that comes to mind and so check me on this is gutter which hosted the World Cup just recently so that's one of the countries that was kept the eagle line alive correct that's one of them yeah there's there's three more of note um that leads up to this point in the story so South Korea Singapore and Saudi Arabia Singapore is the is the country who funded the engine upgrade and then Saudi Arabia is the one who funded uh they had f-15s's and they paid the money to build what became the f-15sa which is the Saudi Advanced all the ones end with a the f-15qa is the newest one and there's an Israeli Advance they're all derivatives of the money that Saudi Arabia paid to advance the F-15 and that's important to realize because the way the the way that we had the Authority for the Department of Defense to buy these aircraft was what's called a rapid acquisition Authority and it has some time limits and it has some technology limits and so it has a it's a five five year authority to basically speed to buy something that's pretty much out in the market already that's that exists and the in the F-15 program that had been running off the line uh is basically a derivative of the f-15sa in fact the first two f-15ex is as if we're recording this there's two in the world that exist that are delivered to the Air Force there's about six or seven more in the production line right now those are actually Qatar f-15s that's how similar we actually cut into their production line and put the US stuff in it and so they're about 95 percent of the same and we can get into some of those details but that's exactly why we have a hotline it's got pretty much everything we need we can change out a few boxes add some special stuff that's kind of U.S Centric and we can kind of speed to the Warfighter to re replenish the fleet that's kind of falling apart I can't remember that this sort of situation has ever existed before that you know we keep a line open with foreign military sales and then we leverage that line by um creating a new type model series that's going to supplement our 5th gen airplanes that that's it's kind of ironic it's also there's some genius here uh in how it's playing out so let's go into some of the details of the the ex starting with the airframe originally there was two concepts there was an F-15 there's a two-seat concept and a single seat concept the Air National Guard wanted a single seat F-15 and the active duty won a two seat at 15. and so in these internal discussions to make it easier it was originally called f-15x they said okay let's call this one the CX and this one the ex the CX is one seat the ex is two seats and so that's kind of how that moniker was created as the kind of Advance F-15 discussions at the end of the day back to again it's really important to understand back to the original Authority it was a rapid procurement from a mature aircraft there is no single seat production line of f-15s in the world every F-15 that's pretty just right now is two seats so ultimately that became the the winning decision based on speed to Market because you would have lost several years of redesigning uh the the forward half of the aircraft to put it back to a single seat so time and money spent by other people we want to leverage other people's money in this case our our foreign material sales to to build the ex so that's where the name came from when you when you actually go and look at the aircraft uh when you walk up to it it's uh it looks a lot like an F-15 the first thing you're probably going to notice is it's a big aircraft just like an F-15 when you when you walk around the aircraft you're gonna know there's the ex has some uh some a few things on the outside that are different um and if you start at the you kind of start at the front work your way back you're going to see in the on the cockpit there's two bumps that are by the the wizo cockpit one on each side there's nothing in them um this this is actually an F-15 QA missile warning system that the U.S didn't buy but because we had already cut into the production line and it was already installed in the aircraft we just took the we took the bumps on the aircraft but there's actually nothing in them uh so it just kind of goes to the speed to Market kind of mentality it's got two cockpits so when you you climb up inside the cockpit and you look you're gonna see it looks completely different uh it's got a low profile heads-up display with a new uh upfront controller which is kind of the computer you type in the displays are probably the one thing that stands out to everyone when they see it it has a huge 19 by 11 high definition flat screen and just for perspective if you see uh an F-35 cockpit you've seen kind of that flat screen this is 30 percent larger is massive and there's one in each cockpit there's two of them it's actually made by the same company that the new block 4 F-35 display is coming from and so again there's a lot of shared Parts between different programs in the defense kind of ecosystem uh the the cockpits are pretty much 95 the same besides the displays uh the same as the f-15e the one difference that stands out is that because the Air National Guard had that single seat kind of requirement they didn't get the single seat but they did get the requirement to be able to fly the aircraft with only a pilot and nothing in the back seat so because of that there's two switches or two panels that had to get moved or created with redundancies and that's the electronic warfare system and the targeting pod so an f-15e they're in the back seat and the pilot can't can't touch them and the f-15ex those those panels are actually both cockpits so it's kind of an either or and there's some uh there's some logic of which one has to be turned on First and all that stuff the rear cockpit also has a helmet mounted queuing system so it has a an hmd so you put on a helmet you can see things in your helmet I've flown with it a few times it was uh interesting but not necessarily compelling because of those big bumps on the on the fuselage that I told you about that kind of blocks your uh your view and the the big ramps from the engine uh they limit some of your uh your air to ground uh point of view the other thing that might be obvious if it's installed is uh pylons on stations one and nine and those are the most outboard pylons so one of the things that allowed those pylons to exist in concept they've been around since the 70s but because uh the F-15 was designed before computers and it was designed with kind of a cable and pulley type system the further away you get from the center line of an aircraft the more instability you induce and so with digital flyby wires like the F-16 has the F-35 has the F-22 it allows you to put things further away from the center line that's why the F-16 and F-35 can carry missiles under wingtips because they have flight control computer that's kind of working through the flutter and the oscillations and there's a few other excursions and flight tests that they can account for faster than a human could so the F-15 to get those weapon stations was upgraded to fly by wire so the f-15ex is a fly-by-wire jet and the all that stuff was kind of ripped out and the wires were ran and now we can actually put things on the station 109 pylons and that kind of opens the door for more weapons so the engines are the gef110 what um they're they're like 29 000 pounds each so uh I'm imagining that gives the airplane a one-to-one Thrust to weight basically a pretty fast airplane like Mach 2.5 the fastest military airplane in the world now the GE 129 engine is a 29 000 pound class engine uh it replaces the Pratt Whitney 229 engine is which is a 29 000 class uh engine the last two digits tell you kind of what power class it is so they're the same power class different manufacturers I've flown I've flown the 220 which is a smaller Pratt the t29 and the 129 and you can put an f-15e with 229s and an f-15ex next to it with 129s and the GE and the ex will walk away from it it is uh it's got a different bypass ratio and some other weird things in it but it's it's got more power the power curve is different and here's the weird thing it's actually more fuel efficient so you get more of everything so replacing Pratt and Whitney with GE where have I heard that before yeah the GE is just it's just a newer it's probably a 15 to 20 year newer design so it's just it's a newer everything interestingly the emiratis in the F-16 program actually paid to develop What's called the ge-132 which is a derivative of that and so it's got 32 000 pounds of thrust and the reason it's not in the f-15ex it goes back to the authority that we had from Congress which is I don't want to spend three or four years doing flight Sciences to do flight controls for a new engine I want you to get the get the aircraft that's on the line into the field so that's kind of the compromise as we ended up with the 129s which are awesome I mean if we had the 132s we probably wouldn't be able to use all the power uh it's awesome let's take a look at the performance of the ex starting with the the flight characteristics is is this just like an e or does this uh fly by wire software give it higher Alpha capability better turn rate how does that play out great question so it's different than both um it's more closely than the E uh than the C so it kind of flies uh I'm a backseater from from I just I've never flown the sea but I I have flown from the back seat in the E and the e x and the this it's kind of a water a little bit watered down uh C model and it's a plus step e-model so it's kind of performed in between the two and the reason is the C model uh the f15c com with nothing in it so no fuel no oil no pylons no weapons it weighs 31 000 pounds that's the f-15e with the same engines weighs about 2 000 pounds more um and then when you put in the bigger Motors it's uh it's about 34 000 pounds so that's 10 000 pounds lighter than an empty Tomcat just for the record and the f-15ex weighs about another thousand pounds heavier than that so it's 35 000 pounds with uh with nothing in it um sitting on the ramp uh you know you put fuel in it and everything and now you can you can operate up to 81 000 pounds so you can over double the weight of it uh so that's kind of the starting numbers uh yeah it's got the digital flyby wire in the 129s and you know it'll it'll get up and go so but it does have a lot of drag because it has to conform of fuel tanks and uh pylons and pods and uh there's some issues with with the configurations that they're they're sorting through right now uh but uh here the here are the numbers these are not the specifications these are the flight test uh so actual like people have gone out and flown this in the past few years uh and this is based on the flight Sciences from the F-15 sa program it has an 800 knot calibrated or indicated AirSpeed limit so that limit kind of sets your Mach number so the fastest the this program has been is mach 2.493 at about 50 000 feet that's that's fast that's a faster that's fast so it's good to know that speed is back right because this is the knock on the F-35 and the Super Hornet is these airplanes are barely Supersonic and everybody's like yeah but survivability and dot dot dot so the ex is a speed machine like the old school fighters of your and that that does my heart good and you know and I've flown plenty with uh with F22 which is amazing machine F35 it does some awesome stuff and you know you can you can be pretty useful you know Mach 1.5 and Below uh getting above Mach 1.5 you start losing turn radius and there's like you you start sacrificing tactical decisions but yeah you can go out there uh get high I get fast and get where you're going yeah and you know if you have to bug out if you you know Ingress egress um sometimes you want to be able to go Mach 2.49 you know I mean certainly have to have that in your back pocket is is not a bad thing let's talk about the air-to-air suite so the aim 120 is kind of still state of the art but there's some other things in in work because we're kind of getting out sticked by the Chinese on paper anyway now so talk to us about what the current air-to-air Suite looks like and what the future one is going to to be so the the f-15c can carry eight muscles uh and the current ones can carry up to eight m120s uh the f-15e is the same way um the f-15ex because it has those extra stations it can carry 12. but the more compelling story about that is is the pylons because as you look into what's next and you look at 5th gen that we that we know today the F-22 and the F-35 one of the one of the the limitations of the F-22 is that that airplane airplane was like physically designed to wrap around the AIM 120. like it fits but like nothing else is going to fit in that aircraft and so when you look at like physics and energetics and just like hey like to make a missile a rocket motor I need so much space to build a motor that has propulsion so I can move something through air those types of like physical constraints is kind of what hamstrungs the F-22 from like kind of being unless you put them on the wings and now you're trading stealth which gets into other different conversation with the f-15x you're not hiding from anybody and you have these pylons that are rated for a massive amount of weight and we can talk about some of that later and so you can start putting outsized uh aired air missiles you know called multi-stage missiles even like two-stage aerator missiles that are really really big and you can put them on those wings and it'll carry it just fine and you don't have to worry about the integration inside of the uh in the fuselage like the F-35 one of the bulk uh the the block four upgrades for F35 is to move the bulkhead for the weapons Bay and to make the weapons Bay bigger because the F-35 was designed with a very constrained weapons Bay size and now they actually have to redesign the airframe to make the weapons Bay bigger uh where again it's not and there's a time and a place for that which is fine but for f-15ex you're not hiding from anyone everything's external carry you bolt it on you go do what we call C Google which is like your flight testing to make sure that you can do say a safe separation and you know you're after the races let's segue into how do we think the operational concept will be for this fourth gen plus f15ex working with f-35s how's that going to go down the the F-15 ex has the apg82 and the apg-82 is a active electronically scanned array and radar so it has a 36 inch antenna class which is the biggest like literally the biggest Esa radar on any fighter in the entire world is 30 larger than the F-35 radar it is huge and back to what I said earlier like you're not hiding from anybody uh if you know the movie uh spinal tap like you can turn the you can turn the power up to 11 and that massive array and you can do some really interesting things where if you're in a 5th gen with the Easter radar you your signature management isn't just your your uh your stealth characteristics it's also your emissions and so there's a lot of things that you you can't you don't want to do in a fifth gen we're in the fifth gen like it doesn't matter because you know you're not hiding from anybody uh so that's that also I'll say that so your your detection ranges and when you can do with some of your sensors uh is is pretty pretty long range I can't tell you the exact numbers but they're very long range uh so not a lot of things are hiding from the F-15 ex um either passively or actively it has a an electronic warfare system that's called the uh the epos alq 250 that's the eagle passive active warning survivably system everyone just calls it epos um that is in the in the f-15es and flight test right now and in the f-15ex so they share the same system and those boxes that are actually in that electronic warfare system are part of the F-35 like block 4 upgrades so you can see there's like cross-pollination of Technology between these aircraft um which most people don't realize you think it's like you know this vendor versus that vendor like well actually there's some strategy between Tech development that actually helps everyone uh so we can kind of get that stuff out there and and refine some of these electronic warfare tactics and programs and then you know Port them over into other programs so so you talked about the F-15 and the apg-82 iusa radar and again we won't just talk about the ranges but it it's it's far and and so you can imagine and this was the same with the og9 the power out would make the Iraqis run away during Desert Storm right the emission footprint was gigantic uh and that was before stealth was a consideration with the exception of the f-117s so but if you're in a an environment uh that is not permissive where stealth matters the f-15ex will be like a wing extension of the F-35 in theory the F-35 can turn off all of its systems and not emit at all and so now there's nothing there's no emissions to be detecting it now I can focus on its RF uh it's it's stealth signature and now the f-15ex could could find the targets maintain the custody and transmit those targets through uh through a dattling to the F-35 and the F-35 isn't transmitting but it's listening for that data link and so you can do a lot of integration where your fourth gen become your eyes and ears and then your 5th gen kind of become your um you know they get the swords out and go do the thing and so when you look at in called inside or Outsider forces where the fourth gen can be behind the fifth gen there's scenarios where you want to put the fourth gen in front of the fifth gen and there's some scenarios we're going to put the fourth gen alongside the fifth gen and so I was talking to someone the other day about it I said you know uh maybe she'd appreciate this remember that as those hearing tests you used to have to do you go inside the hearing Booth every year and you kind of put your things on and you're and you're sitting there and you're and you've done enough so you kind of you're waiting for like the tone and it's it's so quiet it's so quiet and then you're just waiting for the tone uh well imagine like you were trying to do that in a rock concert that is the difference so if all I have out there are say yeah 20 F-35 so that's the only thing in the sky that's the hearing Booth all I'm listening for is that very very faint tone because I know there's nothing else out there if I suddenly put in a whole bunch of different things with different attributes so you're talking about active attributes so your radar signature pass or passive attributes active attributes altitude air speed the amount of variables that you have to tend with and now when you see something which may momentarily show up on one of your uh your indicators and warnings that say an F-35 is coming you don't even know if it's real because there's so much other noise that's running out there like I don't know what that is and that is uh it has a raptor a raptor guy a friend of mine he was telling me he's like man I love going to Red Flag when we have a bunch of fourth gen because it just makes us so much better because everyone we just hide in the noise when we're the only ones out there like everyone knows that there's Raptors out there and nothing else and it's it's actually really hard to hide because yeah we're out there I mean there are ways to find track and kill you know stealth Fighters it's not it is a secret so I'm not saying it's not a secret but it's very very hard to do when you you add other variables to contend with Wow Brave New World it kind of kind of because considerations so what's the future here of the ex here's what I'll tell you as the F-15 it's like the B-52 it was designed before we had computers it was kind of engineered to access the the highest flying f-15e right now in the U.S Air Force has almost 15 000 flight hours on it it's still flying so if you stop thinking of it as just an air-to-air fighter or air superiority fighter and just think about it as like it's a multi-domain platform that has it's smaller than a B-52 but it's faster than B52 and it can carry some some pretty big things when you look at when you again look at the art of the possible and you start using your imagination um the the f-15ex can carry a weapon up to 22 feet long and 7 000 pounds like a single weapon they're gonna actually carry two of them uh but let's say it can carry something that's that big uh I just described the exact specifications of the Aero Hypersonic weapon that's carried by the B-52 when you look at the hyper Hypersonic attack cruise missile hack em that's a a scrim jet powered Hypersonic that the Air Force is buying if it's on the F-15 ex DARPA actually had a Mach 6 Hypersonic that flew called high fly and it flew on 2005 on the F-15 there was actually a NASA program Believe It or Not that used a f-15b to to use uh basically was a modified aim54 to do Mach 5 Hypersonic test bed so we used to shoot those to go Mach 5 to test what Hypersonic weapons would look like and that was back in 2007. it's like these aren't new things the craziest thing I've ever seen on an F-15 I've seen some crazy things the craziest things I've ever heard of is the Israeli Air Force they have a fleet of f-15s they have uh C's and they have they call f-15is which are e-model comparisons they use the F-15 as a um to shoot missiles as targets so they have the two programs one's called the Blue sparrow and one is called the silver Sparrow the silver Sparrow is a 27 foot long 7 000 pound missile that flies 90 miles high and then it comes back down in the atmosphere and they use that as a TBM Target to test their weapons defenses for the country that's crazy when you think like this like the this the size weight and power of what you can put on a platform like that uh it can be very very disruptive so Paco great Intel on the F-15 ex as we said before if you're watching this and you're not already subscribed to the merge newsletter you need to do so immediately and we look forward to talking to you again really soon see you next time mooch thanks all right that's going to do it for this episode if you're not already a subscriber click the button and ring the bell so you don't miss anything going forward if you'd like to help support the Channel please consider using the super thanks the heart icon below or become a patron at patreon.com Ward Carroll and in the meantime I look forward to talking to you again very soon [Music]

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 468,583

Keywords: Ward Carroll, F-15EX, F-15 Eagle, jet fighters, U.S. Air Force, Top Gun, Top Gun Maverick, DCS, DCS World, fighter pilots, F-14 Tomcat

Id: vbOB7KlbcZI

Length: 30min 5sec (1805 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023