Here’s what it’s going to take to upgrade the Blue Angels to Super Hornets

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Boeing just announced that the U.S. Navy awarded the company a more than $12 million contract for "non-recurring design and development engineering for an engineering change proposal" to transition the Blue Angels from Hornets to Super Hornets. This prospect is exciting for aviation aficionados and air show fans nationwide -- not to mention the Blue Angels pilots themselves -- so how soon will the change happen?

To find out WATM spoke with Navy Capt. David Kindley, the Naval Air System Command's program manager for both Hornets and Super Hornets. Not only is Kindley the man in charge of supporting the Navy's Hornet and Super Hornet fleets with engineering updates and maintenance improvements, during his Navy flying career he amassed almost 3,400 flight hours in both the old and new versions of the airplane.

Kindley started the conversation by making it clear that the contract "is by no means the transition taking place. We don't have a specific date. It could take years."

However, he explained that the genesis of the current effort was a desire from Radm. Del Bull, the Chief of Naval Air Training (the Blue Angels' parent command), to "move the transition to the left," as Kindley put it.

"There's a perception in the fleet that NAVAIR moves too slowly," Kindley said. "We see this as an opportunity to show we can go faster."

The first challenge for the program office and relevant fleet commands is to identify 11 Super Hornets (including a couple of two-seat F/A-18Fs) that can be turned into Blue Angel assets. (The Blue Angels only take 7 airplanes -- not including "Fat Albert," the C-130 they use to ferry parts and support personnel -- on the road with them, but they have 11 in their possession.) Boeing isn't manufacturing new Super Hornets specifically for the demonstration team, so the Navy will have to "rob Peter to pay Paul," as the old saying goes, to make it happen.

"Super Hornets are a precious commodity," Kindley said. "This transition is competing with the fact that the fleet is desperate for them."

Kindley explained that the early version of the Super Hornet didn't incorporate the advanced mission software used by fleet squadrons, and therefore those jets are only good for training new pilots on basic handling and not the full warfighting capability of the airplane. That makes them good candidates for use by the Blue Angels who don't need drop bombs and shoot missiles while they're flying their air show routine.

Kindley isn't concerned about the basics of transitioning a squadron from "legacy" Hornets to Super Hornets. "We do this all the time," he said. "This isn't hard."

But he allows that the Blue Angels aren't just another Navy squadron, and he sums up their specific challenges to NAVAIR as "springs, smoke, and paint."

"Springs" refers to the mechanical device that Blue Angels jets have attached to the control stick that creates 7 pounds of forward pressure, which allows pilots more positive control and allows them to fly smoother. However, there's an air conditioning duct in the Super Hornet cockpit that doesn't exist in the regular Hornet right where the spring should attach, so the engineers have to figure out a workaround.

During the show, Blue Angels jets do something other fleet jets don't do under normal circumstances: They trail smoke. That dramatic effect is created when special chemicals mix with the air behind the plane. Creating that effect is the "smoke" part of Kindley's concerns.

The real estate required to make smoke is realized by taking the gun out of the nose and replacing it with a tank. After conducting the initial engineering investigation, NAVAIR engineers discovered two things: The subcontractor's production line for making the tanks is shut down, and it doesn't matter anyway because the old tank won't correctly fit into the Super Hornet's nose, so they have to have new ones made.

And then there's the paint. "Painting an airplane isn't hard," Kindley said. "But un-painting an airplane can be really hard."

What he means is as Boeing strips a Super Hornet to bare metal, corrosion could be discovered. That sort of discovery demands that the contractor reach back out to NAVAIR with a "request for engineering investigation." That potential makes it hard to scope a contract because there's no way to know exactly how much corrosion an airplane might have until the paint comes off. And, of even greater concern to Kindley, it's tough to predict how much time the entire process of repainting 11 jets might take.

And when it gets down to the nitty-gritty of transitioning the Blue Angels to new jets, time will matter a lot. The team's show season ends each year in early November. The pilots, maintainers, and other support personnel have a few weeks off over the holidays, and then they start training for the next season the follow February, operating out of NAF El Centro in California's Imperial Valley about an hour east of San Diego. That means whatever refresher training pilots and maintainers need has to occur before the show routine training starts -- basically, the time between Thanksgiving and Valentines Day.

While the justification for all of this effort is that Super Hornets are easier to maintain and cheaper to fly than legacy Hornets, anyone who's flown both types, like Kindley, knows that the Super Hornet has a lot more thrust available. That performance improvement alone should make for a more dynamic Blue Angels show in the future with faster climbs and tighter high-G turns.

But before they push the current show's envelope, Blue Angels pilots wanted to see how the Super Hornet performed doing the current routine. Last year the team's commanding officer, Capt. Tom Frosch, and the opposing solo pilot, Marine Capt. Jeff Kuss (who was killed in a  mishap while launching on a practice sortie out of Nashville two months ago), successfully flew their parts of the routine using a Super Hornet simulator.

"The Super Hornet was designed to fly inverted for twice as long as the legacy Hornet can," Kindley explained. "There was only one move -- "the double Farvel" -- that we were concerned about, but we found we won't have to modify the airplane at all."

Kindley would also like to see the crowd-pleasing "high alpha pass," where the lead and opposing solo planes fly down the show line at very slow speed while cocked up at an extreme angle, flown even slower and more cocked up.

"The Super Hornet flies slower better than any airplane I've ever seen," Kindley said. The legacy Hornet flies with about 60 knots of forward airspeed at 25 alpha (the angle between the line of the fuselage and the direction of the airplane's travel); the Super Hornet can fly even slower at 60 alpha. But, Kindley warns, the engines on a Super Hornet are spread farther apart than a legacy Hornet and so flying in a maximum alpha regime close to the ground could cause a controllability problem if a Super Hornet pilot loses an engine.

Kindley also described the legacy Hornet's flight control response as "crisper," meaning the airplane took fewer control inputs to get exactly where the pilot wanted it -- obviously an important detail considering how close together the Blue Angels fly in the diamond formation -- but he said that would be a training issue for the team and not something that required NAVAIR engineers to rewrite the Super Hornet's flight control laws.

Overall, Kindley characterized the Blue Angels approach to modifying the show with Super Hornets as "walk before you run."

"I don't speak for them, but I imagine they'd start by flying the current routine and then, once they got comfortable, seeing how the show could be adjusted to accommodate the Super Hornet's performance," he said.

When asked by WATM what the current Blue Angels pilots thought about the potential for Super Hornets, Lt. Joe Hontz, the team's public affairs officer, said in an email, "We know there are discussions about the possibility of an upgrade down the road. Until a decision is made, we will continue to fly a safe demonstration on the reliable F/A-18 Hornet, which has been a strong platform for the team since 1986."