Military Airplanes

Northrop Grumman Corp. on Thursday said that it would bid on a revised $40-billion contract to replace 179 Air Force refueling planes, expressing satisfaction that the armed service had addressed concerns the company had raised. As recently as last week, the Century City-based defense contractor said it might bow out of the competition and leave rival Boeing Co. as the only bidder.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's aides say she just wants to get home to California now and then and would like to do it in a plane that can make it all the way without stopping to refuel. Critics say the San Francisco Democrat is abusing the perks of power by attempting to commandeer a fancy jumbo-size military jet with a "distinguished visitor compartment with sleep accommodations."

Not since the days of Rosie the Riveter have the nation's military aircraft been built on an assembly line. For almost as long as anyone can remember, fighters and bombers have been built like houses: one by one, each taking weeks, if not months, to come together. But if all goes well, the newest jet in the nation's arsenal will be assembled more like a car: on a moving line in a process that the Pentagon hopes will dramatically cut costs and speed production.

A B-52 bomber took off from here Friday with all eight of its engines running on synthetic fuel, the first time that a U.S. military aircraft has flown without the kerosene formula that has been used since the advent of the jets. The nearly six-hour flight of the lumbering Stratofortress went off without a hitch, Air Force officials said, lifting prospects for the use of alternative fuel by the military and commercial airlines as they grapple with the high price of crude oil.

A U.S. Air Force jet crashed Monday in a Sunni Arab insurgent stronghold west of the capital, the military said. Al Jazeera television showed footage of the tangled wreckage of an F-16CG with a U.S. Air Combat Command seal, and of a body it identified as that of the pilot. The U.S. military said it could not confirm the pilot's fate or the cause of the crash in Al Anbar province.

They've become a fixture in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan, a new breed of unmanned aircraft operated with remote controls by "pilots" sitting in virtual cockpits many miles away. But the Air Force's Global Hawk remotely piloted aircraft has never flown a mission over the United States. That is set to change today, when the first Global Hawk lands at Beale Air Force Base near Marysville, a city about 40 miles north of Sacramento.

Boeing Co. on Thursday won the competition to build more than 100 search-and-rescue helicopters for the Air Force under a contract potentially worth $10 billion over a dozen years. The Chicago-based aerospace giant was a surprise winner over archrival Lockheed Martin Corp. and Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. to develop the combat search-and-rescue craft. The Air Force plans to use them to recover downed pilots and transport special-operations personnel into hostile areas.

The German Defense Ministry said it was investigating an incident in which two Israeli fighter jets allegedly fired shots and dropped flares near a German warship patrolling the Lebanese coast as part of a peacekeeping force. Israeli officials denied that the jets fired shots at the German ship. The office of Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz said in a statement that he spoke by telephone to his German counterpart, Franz Josef Jung, about the reports.

The Air Force has decided to destroy its entire fleet of 110 T-3A Firefly training planes, which were grounded in 1997 after crashes that killed six people. The Air Force purchased the British-made, propeller-driven planes for $32 million, and spent $10 million trying to make them airworthy after they were grounded. The aerobatic Firefly went into service in 1993, replacing the T-41. Three Air Force Academy cadets and three instructors were killed in crashes.

It is only 7 a.m., but John Nimrichter has been pulling parts from outdated military airplanes for an hour already. "These things get sizzling hot," he says, looking up at a 1950s-era B-52 bomber sitting on the baked desert just south of Tucson. "You'll lose your breath." Driving up and down endless rows of mothballed fighters, bombers, helicopters and cargo planes, Nimrichter and a crew of 63 fellow Air Force mechanics mine them for replacement parts for aircraft still in use.