American defense giants team up for US Navy’s E-XX “Doomsday” plane

News, US April 5, 2023 , by IRIA No Comments

Three of the U.S.’s largest defense manufacturers, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon Technologies, have teamed up to build the next-generation command-and-control aircraft for the U.S. Navy.

The U.S. Navy plans to replace its fleet of E-6B Mercury planes with the new E-XX “Doomsday” planes. As the name suggests, the E-XX planes are designed to withstand the harshest attacks. The planes are to be used in the mission that U.S. Navy refers to as TACAMO, which means “Take Charge and Move Out”.

The E-XX planes would provide a swift communication channel to the nuclear missile-armed submarines in order to launch a counterstrike. The aircraft would also be used to evacuate the President, Secretary of Defense, and other major national leaders in case a nuclear war breaks out.

The U.S. Navy had been seeking to upgrade or replace its aging fleet of E-6B planes that is reserved for such scenarios. Lockheed Martin’s C-130J-30 Super Hercules would be used as the platform for the new TACAMO planes. C-130J-30 is the largest version of the C-130 plane with at least 15 feet of added space in the fuselage.

Northrop Grumman is heading the project while several other defense companies are working with it. Northrop Grumman’s Director for multi-domain command and control capture programs Henry Cyr said that the stretched fuselage space in the C-130J-30 provides the right amount of space for all the equipment while keeping it rightly sized to fly all missions.

Raytheon Technologies would provide the communications systems for the E-XX planes. The plane would use a very low-frequency radio system developed by Collin Aerospace Industries.

*^{U.S. Air Force C-130J-30 Super Hercules. (Image Credit: Lockheed Martin)}*

According to Henry Cyr, the U.S. Navy plans to buy at least three aircraft in the first phase, based on testing and performance. Nine more planes would be purchased in the next phase. Northrop Grumman has called for a $213.7 million budget request under the TACAMO modernization program. The company expects the U.S. Navy to release its complete requirement sheet in the coming months after which the manufacturing and development would be initiated.

Cyr indicated that the development and manufacturing process would not take too long as newly experimented or underdevelopment technologies would be used for E-XX planes. He said that TACAMO is a “can’t-fail” mission, too important to endanger by experimenting with something unproven.

“This is not intended to be a new technology demonstration. It is intended to take existing capability that can be fielded in the near term,” he said. “The nuclear command and control communication business, it is more important to do 100% of the time correctly than to maybe take a little bit of risk on developing new technology,” he added.