🧵Today as @Boeing delivers the final 747, here's a look at how the military has used the Queen of the Skies over the past five decades. Air Force One is probably the most iconic 747. These two 747-200s, (SAM 28000 & SAM2900) have flown U.S. presidents since the early 1990s. They are scheduled to be replaced by two 747-8 aircraft in the coming years.

🧵I deleted an earlier tweet (screen shot below) because it deserves additional context, which is fully captured in this story we just posted here (1/7) defenseone.com/threats/2023/0… Today, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro was asked about comments made this morning by a four-star admiral who chastised defense companies for using the pandemic as an excuse for not delivering weapons on time. (2/7)

SCOOP: L3Harris to Convert Embraer KC-390s for Aerial Refueling. The goal is to create a tactical tanker that can fly closer to the front lines in a war with a peer competitor and refuel all types of U.S. military planes defenseone.com/business/2022/… While the KC-390 already has wing-mounted refueling pods that can gas up Navy and allied aircraft in flight using hoses, L3Harris will install a refueling boom, which is the standard on U.S. Air Force planes, including the F-15, F-16, F-35A, and all bombers and cargo planes

BREAKING: Boeing CFO Brian West says company will sell 737 MAX aircraft built for Chinese airlines to other customers. Chinese regulators have not re-certified the MAX. "We will begin to remarket some of those airplanes ... earmarked for our Chinese China customers," West says West is speaking at a Morgan Stanley investor conference in California

BREAKING: Boeing CEO David Calhoun says company executives should not have agreed to former President Trump’s terms for the new Air Force One. The company today announced it lost $660M building the two planes “Air Force One I'm just going to call a very unique moment, a very unique negotiation, a very unique set of risks that Boeing probably shouldn't have taken, but we are where we are, and we're going to deliver great airplanes,” Calhoun said on the company’s quarterly earnings call

NOW: Some highlights from @RaytheonTech first quarter earnings call now under way: CEO Greg Hayes expects Congress to pass a higher than $773 billion Pentagon budget for 2023 "to account for inflation and the many unfunded priorities identified by the services" 🧵 Raytheon Technologies' pulling its commercial aviation business out of Russia could cost the company's Collins Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney businesses. The company reduced it full-year sales expectations by $750 million

🧵JUST IN: Government watchdog reveals @LockheedMartin is experiencing numerous issues building new F-35 stealth fighters. Many are pandemic related, but others are long-standing developmental problems gao.gov/assets/gao-22-… The @USGAO report warns that hundreds of existing jets, including ones under construction, or ones that haven't even started assembly, will eventually face costly bills to install new technology that won't be ready for prime time until at least 2029

THREAD: Let's unpack this. First I'll talk about the F-15 & F-16 themselves and then the math. I'm not going to get into the policy decision as much has been written about weather giving fighter jets to Ukraine is crossing a red line with Russia defenseone.com/threats/2022/0…

https://twitter.com/SeanPenn/status/1509626754847031320

The U.S. Air Force has a lot of F-16s, 1,017, according to its latest fact sheet. The Air National Guard is also currently retiring some F-16s. There are plenty more that are retired and parked in Arizona desert. It would take time to get those mothballed F-16s flyable ...

JUST IN: @northropgrumman CEO Kathy Warden says the company expanding hiring in anticipating of workers quitting over the COVID-19 vaccination mandate for federal contractors, which begins on Dec. 8. She says the company doesn't know much of its workforce is vaccinated Northrop Grumman's Aeronautics Systems, which is building the B-21 bomber, took a loss in the third quarter in part due "COVID-19-related impacts on the labor market and employee leave"

I've been MIA from Twitter for the past two weeks. Here's what happened to me after getting my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine military.com/daily-news/202… Two days after getting the second @pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, I experienced heart attack-like symptoms, shortness of breath, chest pain and arm stiffness. At first, I thought it was simply a side effect of the vaccine. It turns out, it was something much worse

Since acting SecNav Thomas Modly said there is “no situation where you go to the media, because the media has an agenda,” I ask my Pentagon Press Corps colleagues to reply with examples of how press coverage of an issue helped protect troops or improve their quality of life. Go! Let’s start with atrocious conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center & the need for better armored vehicles to protect troops who were regularly getting killed by roadside. Here's how then Defense Secretary Robert Gates summed up press coverage of those two issues: " (2/X)