Air Force Special Ops Wants Runway Independence, More Speed
7/14/2023
By Stew Magnuson
TAMPA, Florida — Air Force Special Operations Command has a long technology wish list.
The command is tasked with transporting commandos covertly, quickly and across long distances and to penetrate where other aircraft can’t normally go. Naturally, it wants to improve its performance in all these categories, especially the latter, taking personnel to locations where there are no runways — a job best carried out by rotary-wing aircraft.
But what if almost three-fourths of the planet could serve as a runway by allowing fixed-wing aircraft to land on water? The entire Indo-Pacific could be considered a runway, SOCOM Acquisitions Executive James Smith told reporters recently.
That’s the reasoning behind the idea to bolt pontoons onto a MC-130J airlifter to convert it into a float plane, a concept the command has been studying for more than two years.
Air Force Col. Ken Kuebler, program executive officer for fixed-wing aircraft at SOCOM, said: “We continue to push forward with some of that technology [but] it’s a really hard engineering problem,” he said during a presentation at the SOF Week conference.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/7/14/air-force-special-ops-wants-runway--independence-more-speed
