The airlifter, tail number 01-0194, assigned to the 445th Airlift Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was parked overnight at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport in Texas on March 4, 2025, when severe storms and microbursts of up to 80 mph sent two private Bombardier Challenger jets careening into it.

Video shot that morning showed one of the business jets come to rest beneath the C-17’s wing. The same storm system damaged numerous aircraft at airports across the metroplex.

The collision damaged the C-17’s left-side door, fuselage and nose. The crew flew it home with a Boeing-qualified and Air Force-approved temporary nose panel and landing gear down.

Back in Ohio, maintainers repaired the door and fuselage but determined the left nose panel had to be replaced, which is where the job stalled.

Boeing was unable to find a vendor willing to build tooling for a single nose panel, according to the Air Force. After an unsuccessful repair attempt, the jet was looking at a year in storage followed by another year of repair work, sidelining one of only nine C-17s the wing counts as mission-essential.

The wing turned to the Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO), a Life Cycle Management Center division at Wright-Patterson that hunts for ways to fabricate parts the supply chain can’t deliver.

Engineers there deemed the panel a good candidate for incremental sheet forming, or ISF, in which a robot presses a flat metal sheet into shape a little at a time. Because the machine follows a digital path rather than a mold, tooling is unnecessary.

Working with the University of Dayton Research Institute, the team began production in January 2026. Boeing, along with maintainers from the wing, installed the finished panel in July, and 01-0194 took to the skies again July 30, nearly 17 months after the storm.

“This is a tremendous win for our maintenance group,” Col. Karen Gharst, the 445th Maintenance Group commander, said in a statement. “Using the ISF technology to rapidly produce an otherwise unobtainable part allowed us to avoid a prolonged work stoppage.”

The event marks the first incrementally formed part to fly on an Air Force aircraft.

Boeing closed the C-17 line in 2015, and the Air Force expects to fly the fleet into the 2070s, meaning this may not be the last time the service has to hunt for parts nobody makes anymore.

The RSO is currently working on parts for a KC-135 and an F-15.

Boeing’s BSU-111/B Payload Delivery Unit is a wing-and-turbojet engine kit that converts a 500-pound Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) into a long-range JDAM (JDAM LR) dubbed the GBU-75. The result is a gravity bomb with the reach of a cruise missile.

Boeing said it has spent nearly $100 million of its own money on the program.

“Scaling production of the GBU-75 will provide the fleet with an affordable, sustainable solution designed to eliminate long-range land and sea-based threats to U.S. and international forces,” said Bob Ciesla, vice president of Boeing Precision Engagement Systems.

The BSU-111/B wing-and-engine kit is the latest modification to the JDAM family, which has previously seen the gravity bomb receive a tail kit that steered it roughly 15 nautical miles and a wing kit that further stretched that distance to 40.

The Kratos-designed TDI-J85 engine pushes that past 300.

The JDAM LR’s capabilities go beyond land strikes. The QuickStrike Long Range mining variant pairs it with a bomb carrying a ship-tracking sensor. Boeing has shown concepts loading large numbers onto Air Force bombers, though no Air Force buy has been announced.

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, buys JDAM for both the Air Force and U.S. Navy. The first GBU-75s are bound for the Navy.

The Navy demonstrated the weapon back in April, when Super Hornets released two JDAM LRs over the Point Mugu Sea Range off California.

The April 1 round separated cleanly, fired up its engine and flew 34 minutes before landing within meters of its target. The April 3 round added altitude changes and maneuvering. Each covered roughly 200 nautical miles.

When announcing those tests in April, Capt. Sarah Abbott, the Navy’s Precision Strike Weapons program manager, emphasized the need to give the fleet’s JDAMs greater standoff range.

“As Naval Air Forces in theater continue to rely heavily on JDAM systems, the program recognizes a critical need to provide the fleet with greater standoff range,” she said. “This new capability allows pilots to engage targets from significantly safer distances, maintaining a tactical advantage in contested environments.”

Reusing existing infrastructure is a key aspect of the program’s appeal.

Navy budget documents describe JDAM LR as a modification to the baseline program, built on the existing production line and guidance hardware. Any jet that can drop a conventional JDAM can carry the new variant without modification, according to Boeing’s release.

The award, which had not appeared in the Pentagon’s daily contract announcements as of Aug. 5, is an undefinitized action, meaning Boeing began work before the two sides agreed on a price. The Government Accountability Office has long called these contracts risky because contractors are reimbursed for allowable costs, regardless.

Boeing’s release did not say how many GBU-75s the contract buys, how much they cost or when deliveries begin.

Crews loaded concrete-filled 500-pound BDU-50s and 2,000-pound BDU-56s, built to the size and weight of the real thing, onto the Eagle II’s hardpoints. Over 10 missions, the wing dropped 36 practice bombs, twenty-four 500-pounders and twelve 2,000-pounders, achieving satisfactory scores with zero safety incidents.

Test crews at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, previously dropped bombs from an F-15EX under the 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron, but this is the first time an operational squadron has done so.

The training comes as the 142nd prepares to swap its F-15C Eagles, designed strictly for air-to-air combat, for the multi-role F-15EX. The wing received the Air Force’s first combat-ready Eagle II in June 2024, and is slated to receive 17 more.

Three of the wing’s pilots had prior air-to-ground experience, and all three had been through a nine-month course on the science of dropping bombs and associated tactics. They constructed a condensed version of that course focusing on the basics of bombing and began training the rest of the wing’s pilots.

“The team as a whole outperformed any expectations that we held and went above and beyond, and I think the results ended up speaking for themselves,” said Maj. Jesse Loya, one of the three pilots who developed the training program.

Earlier this year, members of the bomb load crew went to Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, to become certified on bomb loading using F-15E Strike Eagles. Once certified, they returned home and trained the loaders who went to Idaho.

The Air Force has said its growing F-15EX fleet will eventually replace aging F-15E Strike Eagles.

“The speed at which this wing established a completely new capability is a testament to our airmen,” said Col. Joshua Hovanas, commander of the 142nd Operations Group. “This is the first milestone on our path to becoming a premier multi-role fighter squadron.”

The wing returns to Nellis at the end of August to train with live bombs.

Introduced Monday as H.R. 9780 by Rep. Abe Hamadeh, R-Ariz., the BRRRRT Act (Bolstering Recognition, Resurgence, Retention, and Remembrance of the Thunderbolt) gets its name from the bone-rattling “BRRRRT!” sound the jet’s 30mm Gatling gun makes when fired.

Rep. Don Davis, D-N.C., is co-leading the bill. He and Hamadeh both sit on the Armed Services subcommittee that writes fighter force-structure policy, with Davis as the committee’s vice ranking member. Four Republicans also signed on as original cosponsors, including members from Georgia and Missouri, home to the last two A-10 bases.

The bill comes as the Air Force has ramped up A-10 divestment yet has not identified the aircraft that can, and will, take on the close air support and combat search and rescue missions the Warthog has assumed for decades. The service says those roles will be filled by some combination of platforms like the F-35A, F-15E and F-16.

“The A-10 has repeatedly proven itself on the battlefield, saving American lives and delivering unmatched close air support when our troops need it most,” Hamadeh said in a statement announcing the bill. “The BRRRRT Act ensures we do not retire a proven weapons system before a certified replacement exists.”

This bill is the latest move in a lengthy tug-of-war between the Air Force and lawmakers.

The Air Force began fiscal 2026 with 162 Warthogs and tried to retire them all. Congress refused, setting a floor of 103.

Following heavy A-10 involvement in Iran, including the recovery of downed F-15E aircrew, the service announced it would keep squadrons flying at Moody Air Force Base, Georgia, and Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, into 2029 and 2030, roughly 54 jets across three squadrons.

Reaching 126 aircraft would mean halting retirements already scheduled and towing aircraft back out of the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona.

The bill gives the Air Force 90 days after enactment to explain how it will restore depot work, training, sustainment and flight testing, programs that were all cut in anticipation of retiring the fleet.

The depot line at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, closed in February. The last class of new Warthog pilots graduated in April, and the Weapons School course at Nellis is winding down.

Under the bill, retiring more A-10s would become harder, as well. The defense secretary would first have to certify that a replacement is fielded and fully operational, and get that in writing from the Army secretary, the Marine Corps commandant and the head of U.S. Special Operations Command. A mission does not count as replaced, the bill says, if another aircraft picks it up as a secondary tasking.

Should the bill fail to pass, the terms could find their way into the annual defense authorization act instead, which is how the 103-jet floor came to be. Hamadeh took that route in June, placing two A-10 provisions in the House bill that reappear in the BRRRRT Act.

Editor’s note: At the time of publication, the text of H.R. 9780 had not been made public. Details of the bill are based on the July 13 Legislative Counsel draft, provided to Defense News.

The announcement builds on an eventful few weeks for the company’s Corsair drone boats.

On July 12, three Corsairs struck Iran’s Bandar Abbas naval base in what U.S. Central Command called the first combat use of unmanned surface vessels by American forces.

Weeks earlier, a Navy-operated Corsair helped rescue two soldiers after their Army AH-64 Apache went down near the Strait of Hormuz, a mission Central Command called another first of its kind by an unmanned surface vessel.

Founded in 2022, Saronic first unveiled plans for Port Alpha in February 2025 but stopped short of naming a site or a cost. Plans now include an initial 835-acre site in Cameron County, with room to grow to nearly 4,400 acres. It’s an investment the company puts at more than $3 billion. The site was chosen over competing sites in California and Virginia, among others.

Construction is set to break ground this year, with the yard expected to open in 2028. Initially, the facility will be capable of building vessels up to 850 feet, about the length of a U.S. Navy Wasp-class amphibious assault ship, though future expansion could support vessels longer than 1,200 feet, the company said.

Saronic estimates Port Alpha could create up to 10,000 direct jobs over the next decade, from welding and machining to robotics, software engineering and naval architecture. The company also projects $264.5 billion in economic impact for Texas and $160 billion for Cameron County.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who announced the project from Saronic’s Austin headquarters, said a fully built-out yard would deliver about $750 million a year in wages, a sum he called “game-changing for the population of Texas.”

To help land the project, the state extended an $80 million grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund, according to the governor’s office.

Last month, Cameron County commissioners approved a 95% tax abatement for the project over roughly two decades, according to USNI News. The agreement is contingent on Saronic filling 35% of the yard’s jobs with local residents, and the tax break shrinks if the company misses its local hiring targets, the Texas Tribune reported.

The deal was not without local opposition. According to the Border Chronicle, at least 40 people testified or submitted written statements against the abatement, some questioning why a company valued at $9.25 billion needed a tax break. The June 16 vote passed only after two earlier delays and hours of testimony.

Port Alpha would become Saronic’s third site. It runs a plant in central Texas that turns out the 24-foot Corsair, for which the Navy awarded a $392 million production contract in December, and last year it bought a former Gulf Craft yard in Franklin, Louisiana, where it is spending $300 million to build the larger, 180-foot Marauder.

Dino Mavrookas, Saronic’s co-founder and chief executive, did not specify which ships Port Alpha would build but told reporters the company envisions autonomy playing a role in larger hulls over time, according to USNI News.

“Those ships might not be fully autonomous or fully unmanned on day one,” he said. “But over time, as we look at building out the tech and building out the industry as a whole, there’s no reason that you can’t unman those ships completely.”

Port Alpha arrives amid a federal push to rebuild a U.S. shipbuilding base that has fallen far behind China’s. Saronic tied the project to an executive order on maritime dominance that President Donald Trump issued in April 2025, along with the SHIPS for America Act and a federal Maritime Action Plan, all aimed at reversing decades of decline in commercial and naval ship production.

“America’s maritime future depends on our ability to build again,” said Mavrookas, adding that the yard was built “to deliver ships at a speed and scale not seen since World War II.”

Saronic is one of seven companies competing for the Navy’s medium unmanned surface vessel contract, with at-sea testing set to run through October.

The company said it will work with Texas, Cameron County and local schools to build training and apprenticeship programs for the yard, but did not say when it expects to name customers or specific ship classes for Port Alpha.

The deals fall under the U.S. Air Force’s Family of Affordable Mass Missiles program, or FAMM. The Defense Department said it reached agreements with Anduril for its Barracuda-500, CoAspire for its Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile and Zone 5 Technologies for its Rusty Dagger.

The move boils down to cost-effectiveness. The Air Force is betting that low-cost weapons can do the work the service once reserved for far more expensive munitions.

Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, designed to be fired at heavily defended targets from a safe distance, cost more than $1.3 million apiece. The service wants its new missiles for a fraction of that, closer to $218,000 per round, cheap enough to shoot many for less than it once cost to shoot one.

The FAMM program splits into a lugged variant carried by fighters and bombers (FAMM-L) and a palletized variant dropped from airlifters (FAMM-P), both with ranges of 250 to 500 miles.

Anduril said its framework agreement runs seven years, with deliveries starting in 2027. According to the company, the Air Force intends to buy up to 8,000 FAMM rounds a year across both variants and all the competing vendors.

The deals are framework agreements, not orders for missiles. They set the terms and promise the companies steady business, giving them a reason to invest in bigger production lines.

The Defense Department said the missiles still have to complete testing and qualification, and that the actual buys depend on Congress approving the multiyear deals the Pentagon is seeking.

Anduril pitched its missile as proof that cheaper weapons can be built at volume.

“Barracuda-500 is specifically designed to expand the United States’ stand-off strike capability,” Anduril said in its release. “By augmenting existing critical munitions inventories with a more affordable, producible, and flexible option, Anduril is enhancing America’s arsenal of munitions, ensuring that we have the capability required to deter our adversaries.”

To keep the vendors competing, the Pentagon is splitting the work among all qualified suppliers under firm fixed-price terms with a minimum order floor, and companies that beat their production schedules become eligible for additional orders.

Budget projections call for 28,000 missiles across all vendors over five years for $12.6 billion, reaching 7,990 rounds in the final year.

The agreements stem from the Acquisition Transformation Strategy, the Pentagon’s push under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to buy weapons faster and from nontraditional suppliers.

Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Michael P. Duffey said the FAMM deals showed the department “expanding the defense industrial base, fielding capabilities faster, and attracting private investment.”

Zone 5 runs its U.S. operation from California but was acquired in June by Kongsberg, a Norwegian defense company. Anduril and CoAspire are based in California and Virginia, respectively.

The agreement comes on the heels of a May announcement that tapped the same three companies, along with Leidos, for the Army-led Low-Cost Containerized Missiles program, a parallel push for ground-launched affordable missiles.

The Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, or DRPM-UxS, will become “the single joint integrator for all unmanned and autonomous system programs” in the department, according to a June 29 memo the Pentagon made public Wednesday. Its director, yet to be named, will answer to Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg and oversee how the military develops, buys, fields and sustains unmanned systems in the air, on the ground and at sea.

The office’s reach is wide, including small drones in unmanned aircraft groups 1 through 3, unmanned boats, ground robots and counter-drone systems. It also covers the artificial intelligence and swarming software that guides them. Unmanned underwater vehicles will be handled jointly with the Pentagon’s submarine portfolio manager.

The office’s authority stops short of the Pentagon’s major defense acquisition programs, the big-ticket programs that already follow a separate approval process set in law. That means large airframes like the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft and the Navy’s MQ-25 Stingray and MQ-4C Triton stay with the services, as does the Navy’s medium unmanned surface vessel.

Two existing organizations are now moving under the new office. Joint Interagency Task Force 401, which has led the fight against small aerial drones, will expand to countering unmanned threats in every domain. The Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, the Pentagon’s effort to mass-produce cheap drones, becomes a subordinate element. Neither will see its staff or positions relocated, the memo notes.

The new office inherits one of the largest spending increases in the Pentagon’s budget. The department’s latest budget request set aside $53.6 billion for autonomous drone platforms, part of what Pentagon officials called an unprecedented commitment to drones and counter-drone systems.

Separately, the memo names the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s link to commercial tech firms, as the single point of contact for the new portfolio.

The office holds significant power. It will act as the milestone decision authority for its programs, the official who decides whether a weapon advances through development, and it will take precedence on drone acquisition matters behind only Hegseth and Feinberg.

The office can act as the top buying official on its contracts, order the services to shift money between programs through the Pentagon comptroller, and stop any system from reaching the field.

The move also centralizes congressional engagement through the DRPM-UxS, requiring every part of the department to clear its drone-related plans with the office before contacting lawmakers.

The memo says the office’s programs, jobs and people are exempt from the department’s hiring freezes, personnel reductions and reductions in force, and gives its chief the power to hire directly. The memo also lays out a staffing timeline. Once a director is named, hiring is to begin within 30 days, an organizational plan is due within 60 and a full list of the programs moving over is due within 90.

The reorganization is the latest step in Hegseth’s push to field weapons faster, a broader “speed to delivery” initiative that has already drawn warnings from the government’s top auditor.

A Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday found the Pentagon’s independent testing office, which Hegseth cut from 126 civilian jobs to 30 last year, now watches just 15 of about 110 active programs on one fast-track buying pathway, Defense News reported.

It is the latest of several direct reporting portfolio managers Hegseth’s team has stood up to pull the department’s top priorities under Feinberg, and the widest in scope. What this all means for the drone programs already underway inside the services is not spelled out in the memo.

The Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) is the Pentagon’s independent authority on whether new weapons work as intended before reaching the field. In fiscal 2024, DOT&E received $10.6 million specifically to expand its oversight of programs using the Pentagon’s middle tier of acquisition (MTA) pathway, a streamlined process designed to field new capabilities faster by bypassing traditional acquisition steps.

As of February 2026, DOT&E’s oversight list included just 15 of roughly 110 active MTA efforts. The office’s action officers, the staff responsible for assessing individual programs, warned that the services could use MTA and other rapid prototyping pathways to sidestep the operational and live-fire testing requirements written into law.

The gap traces back to a Pentagon reorganization that hollowed out DOT&E’s workforce starting in May 2025. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the office cut from 126 authorized civilian positions to 30, eliminated all but one Senior Executive Service (SES) position and ended contractor support within seven days, according to the memo GAO reviewed.

Hegseth’s memo projected $300 million in annual savings and said the changes would “improve the lethality, readiness, and efficiency of our Armed Forces.” Defense News reported at the time that the cut amounted to more than 50% of the office.

The reorganization unfolded in stages over nearly a year. DOT&E issued six separate reduction-in-force (RIF) notices between June and October 2025 before a continuing resolution paused RIF activity government-wide that November. Staffing partially recovered, reaching 45 positions by September 2025, though it remains well below pre-reorganization levels.

The DOT&E cuts were not an isolated move. They foreshadowed a broader overhaul Hegseth unveiled in November 2025, when he announced the Pentagon would replace its program executive officers with “portfolio acquisition executives” under a system he renamed the Warfighting Acquisition System. “We mean to increase acquisition risk in order to decrease operational risk,” Hegseth said in his National War College address, where he also declared, “Speed to delivery is now our organizing principle.”

The reorganization of DOT&E’s independent testing office reflects an inherent tradeoff: faster fielding, with less independent scrutiny built into the process.

The toll shows up in the numbers. DOT&E’s overall oversight list, not just MTA efforts, fell from 265 programs in fiscal 2024 to 173 in fiscal 2025, a drop of more than 90 programs. The list had held roughly steady for years before that, ranging from 237 to 266 programs between fiscal 2021 and 2024. The one-year collapse marks a sharp break from that trend rather than a continuation of it.

Reasons for the removals, GAO found, ranged from completed testing and program cancellations to mergers and DOT&E’s own determination that oversight was no longer necessary.

Action officers told GAO that workforce reductions left them responsible for more weapons programs, often in areas outside their background, and pointed to specific expertise gaps in electronic warfare oversight. That increases the chance, GAO concluded, that weapon systems reach warfighters with “undocumented shortfalls related to effectiveness, suitability, survivability, or lethality.”

The finding points only to the risk, not a confirmed case of a fielded system reaching troops with an undetected problem.

GAO’s findings echo warnings raised when the reorganization was first announced. Senate Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed, D-RI, called the move “reckless and damaging” at the time, warning that a skeleton crew with limited contractor support could leave DOT&E unable to adequately oversee critical defense programs, undermining independent oversight and exposing warfighters and taxpayers to untested systems. Reed made the remarks amid oversight concerns over the administration’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative.

GAO’s review also found the cuts were not evenly distributed, with DOT&E protecting some capacity even as it shrank elsewhere. Two warfare-area directorates were eliminated outright, one covering net-centric, space and missile defense systems, the other handling strategic initiatives, policy and emerging technologies. Two new units focused on cyber and space were stood up and staffed up faster than most of the rest of the office, according to GAO’s data.

The reshuffling reached the top of the office as well. The reorganization eliminated DOT&E’s SES-level deputy director positions, which had given the office standing roughly equivalent to a two-star general in dealings with the services’ acquisition communities. In their place, the office dual-hatted non-supervisory GS-15 action officers into deputy roles. DOT&E’s current director told GAO he is working to convert those into senior GS-15 supervisory positions.

DOT&E has also missed a deadline set by Congress. The explanatory statement accompanying the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, directed the office to report to congressional defense committees within 60 days of the law’s enactment on how the reorganization affected its testing activities. As of May 2026, that report had not been submitted.

GAO issued no formal recommendations but raised several questions for lawmakers. One is whether MTA programs should be written explicitly into DOT&E’s statutory oversight authority, since the pathway currently falls outside the office’s formal mandate.

Another is whether deputy director positions should carry SES rank to ensure continuity. A third is whether DOT&E needs its own repository for test and evaluation data rather than relying on the Institute for Defense Analyses’ contractor-managed system.

The crash is the first time an OA-1K has been destroyed since the missionized aircraft entered service in April 2025.

The board determined the pilot mistakenly engaged the fuel shutoff valve, normally reserved for emergencies, when the instructor told him to open the nearby fuselage fuel tank valve, a routine check crews run on nearly every flight.

The mistake “isolated the fuel supply from the aircraft firewall, starving the engine of fuel in flight,” the report said.

No one was hurt, but the aircraft was destroyed, with damage estimated at $17.9 million.

The report points to a key difference between the Block-0 and Block-1 variants as a likely source of the confusion.

Photos included in the report show the red fuel shutoff valve handle and the silver fuselage fuel tank valve lever positioned about five inches apart on the front-left side of the cockpit.

A photo taken from the pilot’s front-seat vantage point in the Block-1 variant shows the silver fuselage fuel tank valve partly hidden by the inboard power lever, while the red emergency shutoff handle is in clear view.

Of the student’s 37.3 flight hours in the aircraft, 34.1 were in the Block-0 trainer variant, which has a significantly smaller power lever that does not obscure the silver fuselage fuel tank valve he intended to activate.

The student pilot had logged just 3.2 hours in the Block-1 he was flying that day.

The board found the student “incorrectly identified the fuel shutoff valve handle as the fuselage fuel tank valve lever.” The report does not recommend any change to the cockpit layout.

The student pilot was an active-duty U-28 evaluator pilot with more than 2,300 flight hours.

The civilian contractor instructor was a qualified OA-1K instructor with 551 hours in the OA-1K. The report does not indicate how many hours the instructor had in each variant.

The crew was flying an initial qualification training sortie from Will Rogers Air National Guard Base under the call sign ZORRO 75.

The aircraft was operated by the 17th Special Operations Squadron, the formal training unit standing up the Skyraider II fleet, and assigned to the 492nd Special Operations Wing at Hurlburt Field, Florida.

The crew had leveled off at 2,300 feet above the ground when the instructor called for the fuel check. After erroneously cutting off fuel, the student realized his mistake and turned it back on a few seconds later, but by then the engine was already winding down, and restoring fuel alone would not restart it.

He never told the instructor seated behind him what had occurred.

The instructor took the controls, called a mayday and put the Skyraider II down in a field near Southeast 119th Street and South Sooner Road. The aircraft clipped a tree, road signs, two utility poles and a barbed-wire fence before coming to a stop, with a piece of utility pole guy wire twisted around the propeller.

The board cited three factors that substantially contributed to the crash, all tied to how the tandem crew handled the moment rather than the aircraft itself: pilot task saturation, ineffective task prioritization, communications challenges and ineffective crew resource management.

The report notes that the student was also struggling with his helmet and intercom settings amid engine and wind noise, and turned his attention to the communications problem just as fuel pressure began to drop.

The board also faulted the crew for skipping the emergency steps that might have prevented the crash.

Rather than running the critical action procedures, the instructor focused on setting up the forced landing. Those procedures are “designed to restart the engine, and if unsuccessful, feather the propeller to increase glide distance and time available for decision making before impact,” the report said.

At 2,300 feet, the board found the crew had time to try.

The OA-1K is a militarized version of the Air Tractor AT-802 crop duster, bought under U.S. Special Operations Command’s Armed Overwatch program. It is designed to give isolated special operations teams armed overwatch and reconnaissance from rough dirt strips. The program of record is 75 aircraft, though 53 have been funded to date.

The maneuver surfaced in a Wednesday report accompanying the House Appropriations Committee’s fiscal 2027 defense bill, and it runs on money the White House went looking for a week earlier.

In a June 17 budget amendment to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., the Office of Management and Budget asked Congress to steer more than $1.55 billion into the Air Force’s research and development account to keep the airborne battle management jet alive — money the service had left out of its original request after the Pentagon moved to cancel the program just a year ago.

Getting there required two cuts and one deposit.

OMB carved about $651 million from the Navy account that buys the E-2D Hawkeye and $899 million from the Air Force’s other procurement account. It funneled the combined sum into Air Force research, development, test and evaluation.

The House report pins the Air Force half on the Special Update Program, one of the service’s classified procurement lines.

The justification ran identically across all three amendments: The money would “deliver two E-7 Wedgetail prototype aircraft and continue Engineering Manufacturing and Development activities for a program of record.”

The Air Force already has seven E-7s on contract, including two rapid prototypes and five more added under a March modification. However, all are developmental jets meant to prove out the U.S. design before any production decision, which is why the money lands in research and development rather than procurement.

The committee pointed to the war in Iran to make its case.

“The conflict in Iran has reinforced the need for the Air Force to maintain a credible airborne battle management capability, currently being met with the Air Force’s E–3 Airborne Warning and Control System and the Navy’s E–2D Hawkeye programs,” the committee wrote. “As the E–3 is set to retire, the E–7 Wedgetail will serve as modern replacement for lost battle management capability.”

Panel pushes back on taking Hawkeye money

The Hawkeye money, though, was not OMB’s to spend. The House panel backed the E-7 realignment but rejected the Navy offset, restoring the $651 million the White House had taken from the Hawkeye program.

“While the committee wholly supports the E–7 program and funding realignment, the Committee also restored the E–2D program to six aircraft for fiscal year 2027,” the report states. “The committee understands the operational necessity of the E–2D platform; the complementary nature of the E–2D and E–7; and believes that more aircraft, not fewer, are necessary to support our warfighters now and in the future.”

For all the money in motion, it buys prototypes and development work, not a Wedgetail fleet. Lawmakers want to know what comes next.

The report orders the Air Force secretary to brief the House and Senate defense appropriations subcommittees, alongside the 2028 request, on “the full E–7 acquisition strategy, to include required quantity; funding requirements across the future years defense program; and schedules for development and production.”

Prior to the war in Iran, the Air Force wanted to scrap the E-7 program, a platform already flying with Australia, the U.K. and other allies, after an Air Force official said its per-aircraft cost had climbed from $588 million to $724 million, and amid doubts about whether it could survive in contested airspace.

The previous plan was to lean on extra E-2Ds and a future of space-based sensors instead.

The war with Iran undercut that case, exposing a near-term battle management gap that satellites cannot yet fill, compelling the Pentagon to reverse course this spring.