It is a very large undertaking, a collision of mods, as we say, went Oryan Joseph, who is the program manager of the F-16 Program Office of the directorate.
It is that line that one notices on a flight line, when one looks at an F-16: that the jet just has staying power is not airshow myth-making. It represents an industrial-level effort to maintain a fourth-generation fighter fighting fit tactically by swapping what is behind the radome and in the cockpit as aggressively as that which is supporting the wings.
The number concerning the headline is structural. Service Life Extension Program of U.S. Air Force is designed by operating on the premise of taking airframes with much shorter life expectancy and stretching them to 12,000 flight hours which is basically a purchase of time by a fleet which continues to bear a disproportionately large daily workload. The extension is not formless; it comes in the form of reinforcements to larger load-bearing components, such as upper wing and fuselage components, such that the jet can continue to accommodate the high-G fatigue without a foreseeable cliff.
The larger change however, is cognitive. It is putting an improved F-16 in a less pure dogfighter role, but rather a high-speed survivable sensor and weapons truck capable of keeping up in a data-filled combat. The most evident is radar: modern F-16s are getting an AN/APG-83 AESA radar class system, as opposed to the older sets which were mechanically scanned, with electronically steered beams and new processing. The most often mentioned payoff is tactical bandwidth- AESA-equipped aircrafts are able to handle dense air pictures, multi-intercept geometries and still stay on track during other tasks. A summary of the leap of the F-16 in this upgrade story is the capability to shoot as many as 20 targets at a time.
The other side of the coin is passive sensing. Infrared Search and Track (IRST) provides an alternate method to locate and track targets without broadcast that opens alternatives when the emission controls are important or an electronic attack makes radar performance more challenging. Combined with the current electronic warfare, IRST assists in transforming the F-16 into a platform that instead of being pointed at a problem, is able to construct a portrait silently and transmit it.
The metaphor of “brains” has come into practice in that sharing piece. The Air Force is spurring a massive modernization program that will see 608 F-16s get a break pack of upgrades in a program dubbed as PoBIT, such as the addition of the Link 16, cockpit modernization, mission-computer work and is converting to a higher speed onboard data network. It is not concerning a single silver-bullet gadget; rather, it is about ensuring that the sensors, defensive mechanisms, and displays of the jet can move rapidly enough to make sure that the pilot can take action on the information before the situation can evolve.
That principle applies to allied service: the reason the F-16 and F-35 are not considered substitutes and rather supplementary means. One of them feeds scale and sortie generation, the other one feeds deep sensing and stealth in the toughest airspace. The role of the modernized F-16 is somewhere in the middle: it is made more lethal, but it is also more connected without attempting to transform its airframe into what it was not originally intended to be.
To engineers, the second life of the F-16 is a lesson study in how durability is designed: longer structure, then more of a “nervous system” so the jet may continue to operate in the current sensors-and-network environment of today, versus the image-only environment of yesterday.
