Late last month at Birmingham Airport,
Boeing completed the first flight of the UK’s E-7 Wedgetail for the
Royal Air Force (RAF), marking a significant milestone in the programme’s test and evaluation phase. The aeroplane is one of three 737 NG aircraft on British soil undergoing modification by a team of over 100 people at STS Aviation Services in Birmingham.
Stu Voboril, Boeing’s vice president and E-7 programme manager, said: “This safe and systematic ‘functional check flight’ is an important step for Boeing and the RAF as part of our rigorous and extensive testing and evaluation. Our team is committed to ensuring the E-7 delivers the safety, quality, and capabilities we have promised to our customer as we prepare for delivery of the UK’s first E-7 Wedgetail to the RAF.”
The combat-proven E-7 detects and identifies adversarial targets at long range and tracks multiple airborne and maritime threats simultaneously with 360deg coverage via the ‘Multi-role Electronically Scanned Array’ (MESA) sensor. This provides ‘critical multi-domain awareness and command-and-control decision advantage’.
The future UK E-7 fleet will operate from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland, where Boeing’s local suppliers and contractors are nearing completion of the infrastructure facilities to support its introduction into service. The RAF participates in a tri-lateral agreement with the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and US Air Force (USAF) toward cooperative Wedgetail interoperability, capability development, evaluation and testing, sustainment, operations, training, and safety.
Boeing has a UK workforce of over 4,000 people, including career starters, veterans and reserves throughout the country, and has spent more than £13.7 billion with over 950 UK-based suppliers since 2015.