Air Force Light Attack Vision Inches Closer to Reality.

• Author: Machi, Vivienne

The Air Force's light attack aircraft experiment, also known as OA-X, can be viewed as one of the Pentagon's key attempts to try to break the cumbersome acquisition paradigm. Less than two years after the effort was announced, the service is moving toward procuring a new aircraft.

The service has been testing commercial-off-the-shelf platforms that could perform light attack and close-air-support missions in permissive environments at a lower cost than using fourth- and fifth-generation jets. In early 2017, leadership announced a plan to gather test data from existing platforms to gauge their viability in filling a crucial need for key counterinsurgency missions, as well as provide additional cockpits to help close the service's current pilot shortage gap.

That summer, four aircraft--three turboprops including Sierra Nevada Corp. and Embraer's A-29 Super Tucano, Air Tractor Inc.'s AT-802L Long-sword and Textron Aviation's AT-6 Wolverine, along with Textron's Scorpion AirLand jet--underwent a variety of tests at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.

In early 2018, the Air Force announced the contenders had been pared down to two participants: The A-29 and the AT-6. Those two aircraft began combat flight demonstrations in early May at Holloman, continuing to do so until a fatal accident involving a Super Tucano prematurely ended the rest of the test sorties in late June.

Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, recently told reporters that the service had gathered an extensive amount of data between the first part of the experiment and the flights that were performed up until the time of the accident.

The 2017 portion of the experiment sought to analyze the aircrafts' ability to: "find, fix, track and target;" perform datalink interoperability; and ensure weapons delivery and accuracy, among other criteria, service officials said at Holloman last year. The second part aimed to gather data related to logistics and maintenance support, as well as demonstrate the feasibility of using a commercial-off-the-shelf network system that could be easily installed and moved across various aircraft, Bunch said during a media event at the Pentagon.

"We had been asked to come up with a network that would be 100 percent exportable, that [we] would be able to install in the aircraft and that we would be able to fly with," he said. "We demonstrated ... [that] we could utilize...