F-16 News

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Primeiro F-16C Block 70 para a Eslováquia.

[P44]

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[P44]

[Túlio]

Descontando as bugigangas OTAN (Link, IFF, etc), o F-16 da FAP difere em que dos que vão para a FAA? Aliás, há diferenças importantes para com os exportados à Romênia, esta também membro da OTAN?

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Não faço menor ideia, mas em relação aos F16 romenos eles foram vendidos na tape 5.2 enquanto que os Portugueses já eram 6. Dizia-se que tinha sido por pressão dos EUA.

[Túlio]

Não faço menor ideia, mas em relação aos F16 romenos eles foram vendidos na tape 5.2 enquanto que os Portugueses já eram 6. Dizia-se que tinha sido por pressão dos EUA.

Supunha eu que tivessem sido modernizados em Portugal (OGMA?) antes de serem vendidos...

[cabeça de martelo]

Não faço menor ideia, mas em relação aos F16 romenos eles foram vendidos na tape 5.2 enquanto que os Portugueses já eram 6. Dizia-se que tinha sido por pressão dos EUA.

Supunha eu que tivessem sido modernizados em Portugal (OGMA?) antes de serem vendidos...

Foram todos modernizados pela FAP ou os últimos pela OGMA, no programa MLU.


A Tape com que foram vendidos é que era inferior ao dos restantes F16 nacionais. Presumo que tenha sido para os Norte-americanos terem mais negócios com os Romenos do que "apenas" vender armamento.

https://passarodeferro-operations.blogs ... ima_6.html

http://www.passarodeferro.com/2013/10/f ... 5.html?m=1

http://www.passarodeferro.com/2024/02/p ... o.html?m=1

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Inside The Lockheed Martin Plant That’s Spearheading Resurgent F-16 Sales
Branded Content: 50 years after its first flight, Viper orders are growing stronger for a fighter that still meets operator needs.
JAMIE HUNTER

The sound of rivet guns pounding fasteners into place, a robot drilling thousands of holes in metal, cranes heaving pieces of yellow primer-painted fuselage into assembly jigs. The Lockheed Martin production facility in Greenville, South Carolina, is a hive of activity. Here, brand new F-16 fighter aircraft are being built on an assembly line that the manufacturer thought might never exist.

Seven years after the last F-16 Fighting Falcon was delivered from Lockheed Martin’s historic Fort Worth production facility, a new manufacturing line for the aircraft is now delivering brand new jets and reacting to meet unexpected resurgent demand for the latest generation of the prolific fighter.

The plant at Donaldson Airport, Greenville, is now the center of Lockheed Martin’s F-16 production effort. Here, the company is building brand new Block 70/72 variants of the fighter that’s known unofficially as the Viper for new and returning F-16 customers, including Bahrain, Bulgaria, Jordan, Slovakia, and Taiwan.


An F-16D in production at Lockheed Martin’s Greenville facility. Lockheed Martin

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the maiden flight of the F-16, which occurred on January 20, 1974. The very first YF-16 was rolled out at Fort Worth on December 13, 1973, and by November 2017 the last of 36 Block 52 F-16s for the Iraqi Air Force was delivered, heralding the end of almost 44 years of F-16 manufacturing at the Texas plant. During that time, some 3,620 F-16s were built in Fort Worth, initially by General Dynamics and then by Lockheed when it acquired General Dynamics’ Fort Worth Convair division in 1993.

The sprawling Texas production line pumped out an incredible 286 F-16s in 1987 at the height of production for the Viper. In addition, F-16s were built under license by the European partner nations that ordered the F-16A/B in large numbers in the 1970s and 1980s, with other examples assembled in South Korea and in Türkiye.

A total of 4,588 F-16s were manufactured globally before F-16 production was moved to Greenville in 2019. Fort Worth is now dedicated to F-35 Lightning II production and final assembly work, with the Greenville site having been repurposed from being a C-130 Hercules and P-3 Orion overhaul support facility to being the new home of the company’s F-16 program.

“We now conduct both F-16 production and the depot level maintenance of some CONUS [Continental U.S.] based U.S. Air Force F-16s here. We also have our program management operations all out of the same site,” says Caleb Hendrick, Lockheed Martin’s F-16 production director at Greenville. The facility, located on land that is owned by SC Tech Aviation Center, is marking 40 years as a Lockheed/Lockheed Martin facility this year.

“The F-35 work at Fort Worth was expanding in terms of the footprint and logistics. We just didn’t have the room or capacity to continue F-16 production there as well,” explains Hendrick. “So we decided to complete the final F-16s that were on contract at Fort Worth in 2017, and that was a demarcation line for the company.” Lockheed Martin looked at options for continued F-16 production.

Instead of petering out, new F-16 orders continued to roll in. “As soon as the orders started to mount up we made the move to bring the F-16 production line here,” explains Hendrick. Brand new Block 70/72 model F-16C/Ds would be built in the appropriately named hangar H16 at Greenville, which was previously used for C-130 maintenance.

In 2017, Greenville started the process of preparing for F-16 manufacturing. The aircraft’s production jigs and tooling were trucked from Fort Worth to Greenville in 2018, and the initial production work on the new F-16 line commenced in 2019 when the inaugural hole was drilled for a center fuselage of the first new Royal Bahraini Air Force F-16.

“Then the international demand for the F-16 blew up again! I’ve worked on many programs including F-22 Raptor, C-130 Hercules, and F-35, and I can tell you that I’ve never seen the focus as intense as it is right this minute with the F-16. For a program that we thought might go into the sunset, now we are ramping up to build four F-16s per month at our new full production rate.”

The mounting F-16 order book is impressive, with 140 fighters currently on contract. This comprises Bahrain (16 aircraft), Bulgaria (eight), Jordan (12), Slovakia (14), and Taiwan (66). With 11 of these delivered as of June 2024 (six for Bahrain and five for Slovakia), Lockheed had a backlog of 129 jets, including 24 that are being built for an undisclosed customer. Bulgaria has signed a Letter Of Authorization for an additional eight jets for its fleet.

“We are now at a total of 4,599 F-16s delivered throughout the life of the program [as of June 2024],” says Hendrick. “We see potential for 300 F-16 sales in addition to our current backlog of 131, based on international interest in Europe, Africa, and Asia.” Those 300 potential orders include Türkiye, which has a deal in progress for an undisclosed number of F-16s, which you can read more about here.

Block 70/72 – the ultimate Viper?
The Block 70/72 variant of the F-16 builds on years of incremental development work, facilitated by Lockheed Martin’s multitude of customers. This has resulted in a highly capable, and now extremely affordable fighter, that’s being offered to international customers through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program.

The Block 70/72 variant of the F-16C/D being built in Greenville incorporates a host of features from the upgrade variant known as the F-16V, which is underway within four countries as an enhancement package for existing aircraft. “The Block 70/72 and Viper or ‘V’ upgrades represent new blocks/new capabilities for the F-16. The C/D designation is simply the well-known, ongoing standard designation for whether a jet is a one-seater or a two-seater,” Lockheed Martin states.

At the heart of the F-16V’s updated avionics suite is the Northrop Grumman AN/APG-83 Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR), which features an active electronically scanned array (AESA). This provides the jet with much-improved detection and engagement ranges, fidelity, major increase in ability to spot low-flying small signature targets like cruise missiles, and electronic countermeasure resistance. It’s also far more reliable, without any components needed to physically move the sensor array around.

The F-16V also features a new Center Pedestal Display (CPD) in the cockpit. The large multi-function display augments the two 4×4-inch displays on each side of the Head Up Display control interface, and it offers greater space to display much more detailed information.

The Block 70/72 draws heavily on the F-16V, but as a new-build airframe that offers a service life that’s been increased from 8,000 to 12,000-hours. Some 70 percent of the airframe has been modified compared to the early F-16A/Bs, building on years of historic technical data and learning from structural enhancement programs such as Falcon STAR and Falcon UP, which reinforced certain critical areas of the F-16’s airframe that were susceptible to fatigue. The new build F-16s also come with the choice of engine — the Block 70 has the General Electric F110-GE-129 that offers 29,000 pounds of thrust and the Block 72 has the Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-229 with 29,160 pounds of thrust.

“The modern Block 70/72 F-16 has taken all the learning across the entire evolution of the Viper, right back to the very first A-models,” says Lockheed Martin F-16 test pilot Chris “Sasquach” Nations. “We’ve improved upon it to the point that now we have solved many of those early issues and created a near flawless, highly capable aircraft that is driven towards producing the results that its customers require.”

“Inside the cockpit, there are significant improvements. The biggest one that you’ll notice is the CPD that gives the pilot an additional 6×8-inch screen. The avionics now allow me to pick and choose whatever display I want to use for what purpose. I can repeat displays across two different sensors, I can centralize maybe a map on the CPD because it’s a bigger, wider, area of real estate that allows me to really look into that map.”

“Or if I have a targeting pod, I have the ability to transition where that image is being displayed. You can place whatever system you want on whichever display, and that capability for the pilot is game-changing. You’re not locked into one item in one spot, you can really centralize whatever works for you and then capitalize on it so that you are the highest performing individual in that jet.”

Neatly pairing the cockpit displays with the aircraft’s sensors is a critical factor in maximizing the pilot’s ability to effectively conduct a mission. “There’s a common misperception between sensor fusion and sensor correlation,” Nations says. “What we’re working with in the F-16 is the highest levels of correlation. We are taking all those sensors and placing them into a system that allows the pilot to make the optimal solution based on the information presented.”

“Additionally, the new avionics in the Block 70/72 allow simultaneous operation of those systems from the front seat and the back seat of the two seat F-16D, whereas legacy F-16s gave the back seater a simple repeater of the other cockpit’s information. Now, both individuals in the plane can simultaneously interact with it in a way that’s never happened before.”



“One of the key capabilities of the Block 70/72 is the automatic ground collision avoidance system [Auto-GCAS]. We’re talking about a system inherent to the plane that saves pilots when they can’t save themselves. Having done this for many, many years, unfortunately, I have lost friends who have flown into the ground. I wish we’d had Auto-GCAS earlier. I’ve been working on it personally for over a decade, improving the algorithms and making sure that the jet provides the optimal solution while not interfering with the pilot’s normal operational missions.”

Auto-GCAS is designed to take control and safely recover the aircraft if the pilot becomes incapacitated, usually by pulling too many g-forces, which can lead to them becoming unconscious or severely disoriented due to a lack of blood flow to the brain. “It’s a real threat, something that we train to prevent, but it’s still something that’s always present in the background,” explains Nations. “The GCAS system will recognize the fact that this individual is not responding and is not trying to save the aircraft.”

https://www.twz.com/sponsored-content/i ... f-16-sales