Aerial maneuvers: upgrades will keep F-15's, F-16's in combat for two more decades.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: FIGHTER UPGRADES

Boeing's F-15 Eagle and Lockheed Martin's F-16 Fighting Falcon are dueling, if not in the sky, then in the marketplace. Both companies are actively selling their jet fighters at home and abroad.

To keep the legacy fleets flying for another 20 years, the Defense Department and the fighters' overseas customers have a long list of upgrades in the works. Despite the arrival of the F-22 Raptor and the development of the F-35 joint strike fighter, production of the older fighters continues.

"They're so far up the production curve that building them is pretty cost effective," said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group. "They come with attractive price tags and modern systems."

For the F-15, upgrades are divided into two categories, one set for the A through D models built in the 1970s and early 1980s, and a second for the F-15E Strike Eagle introduced in the late 1980s, said George Spencer, director of the U.S. Air Force's F-15 Systems Group.

"Our whole objective is to keep the Eagle viable past 2025," Spencer said at an Institute for Defense and Government Advancement conference. There are currently 224 Eagles in the U.S. fleet. "We look at what we can afford, as well as what's going to give us the most bang for the buck," he added.

Upgrades to the aircraft's sensor arrays top the list, he said.

The active electronically scanned array (AESA) is replacing the APG-70 radar. AESA allows a pilot to track and target multiple targets.

Advanced processors will replace on-board computers. The tenfold increase in computing power will help pave the way for the F-15E to drop a new weapon now in development by the U.S. Air Force, the small diameter bomb. Further computer upgrades will be added in 2009 and 2012.

"We need that speed and memory in order to make this happen," Spencer said, adding that "AESA gives us a significant amount of lethality." The goal is to "put bombs on targets faster."

The upgraded computers will allow the F-15 to integrate new weapons systems more efficiently, and "that's going to be a significant cost advantage for us," Spencer said.

The Eagle can carry almost every type of ordnance, totaling 23,000 pounds on each aircraft. It can carry three GBU-28, 5,000-pound bunker busters and will be capable of loading 28 small-diameter bombs. This kind of flexibility makes the F-15 special, Spencer said.

The program receives between $300 million to $400 million per year to spend on upgrades, a figure that has been stable over the...