A U.S. Air Force E-4B assigned to the 595th Command & Control Group, Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., flies on a training sortie over the Midwest, May, 15, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Codie Trimble)
AFA WARFARE 2025 — A failure by lawmakers to pass a budget for fiscal year 2025 risks delaying the Air Force’s effort to field a new fleet of jumbo jets that can survive nuclear war, according to a company executive involved with the project.
Jon Piatt, SNC’s executive vice president for ISR, aviation and security, told Breaking Defense on the sidelines of the AFA Warfare Symposium on Tuesday that the Survivable Airborne Operations Center (SAOC) program is “fenced off” from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s budget drill, falling into the exempt category of nuclear command, control and communications. However, he said the aircraft conversion effort will be set back if Congress cannot agree on FY25 appropriations and instead opt for a stopgap funding patch known as a continuing resolution (CR) that would freeze funding at FY24 levels for the remainder of the fiscal year.
“I’m ramping up my work. I’m adding new facilities, I’m adding infrastructure, I’m adding cost. That cost has to be carried by someone,” Piatt said. The company is underway with large-scale expansions of efforts to militarize Boeing 747 jumbo jets that serve as a flying command center capable of surviving a nuclear blast, earning the “Doomsday” moniker for the fleet. The jets SNC is converting will replace older 747 aircraft, dubbed E-4B or “Nightwatch,” that also regularly transport top military officials like the defense secretary.
“It’s kind of hard to predict” exactly how much the program could be delayed “until we actually know if we’re going to realize the CR impact,” Piatt said. “What I will say is it indeed has a ripple effect.”
Congress ultimately provided roughly $700 million for the SAOC program in the FY24 budget, but the Air Force is seeking roughly a billion dollars more in FY25 as work gets underway following SNC’s contract win in April 2024. But whether those additional funds will be delivered in FY25 appears increasingly unlikely, as President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson now both back a plan for a full-year CR.
The Air Force’s request is seeking “about $1.7 billion in programmed funding for 2025. That’s a lot of people, it’s a lot of subcontractors,” Piatt said, pointing to other complications like a possible disruption in negotiations to procure more 747s, which could raise costs in turn. “I’m gonna have to put a halt to my hiring, which might impact some of the work we perform.”
According to Piatt, SNC is currently constructing a “baseline digital design” for the firm’s conversion work, which he characterized as the “foundation” for planned modifications. The efforts will also result in an “integrated digital environment” that will provide the data models the Air Force needs to carry out sustainment efforts, he said.
SNC has a lot to learn about the 747, as Piatt said the company will be “going through the digital design and discovery phase for at least four-to-five years.” Still, he said, the company is building in the required schedule margin to carry out the work to keep things on track — so long as necessary funding comes through.
“Even though they look similar, every aircraft can be slightly unique to the other. So we’re doing all of our scans internally and externally on all aircraft as a baseline configuration, making sure that we’re building that comparative database,” Piatt said. “When we get into the configuration management, there could be minor variations. We’re going to discover some differences, and we’re building that expectation into our primary schedule. We’re not expecting anything that’s going to be a major impact on the schedule,” he added.
SNC’s work on the SAOC program is somewhat similar to Boeing’s efforts to deliver new Air Force One planes, whose years of setbacks have drawn the ire of President Donald Trump — and the reported threat of cancellation under the Biden administration. Piatt acknowledged that though the SAOC and Air Force One programs have two different sets of requirements, they have “a lot of commonality.”
Nevertheless, SNC has “not been asked to do anything specific” on the Air Force One program, Piatt said.
