ORLANDO -- The Air Force may try to sell some of the brand new C-27J Joint Cargo Aircraft and Block 30 RQ-4 Global Hawks it plans to retire, service officials said Friday.
Both aircraft represent "new airframes, essentially, so we will probably set rules for type 1000 recoverable storage, and lesser numbers [of aircraft may be set aside] for availability to others," said Air Force Secretary Michael Donley at a press conference at an Air Force Association-sponsored conference here.
"Our international affairs staff are communicating to potential countries [and] interested partners, asking for them to identify their interest, I think there are a number of avenues available to us but we have not selected a particular course of action. We're putting that together and it does include potentially making these airframes available for sale to other parties."
The Air Force retired the relatively small fleet of brand new C-27Js and Block 30 Global Hawks as part of its efforts save billions of dollars in the coming years.
The service justified the cuts by saying the C-27's mission of on-demand ressuply of ground troops at remote bases can be performed by the C-130 Hercules fleet, while the legendary U-2 spy plane can perform the elecro-optical ISR mission better than the Block 30 Global Hawks originally slated to replace it. The planes are currently slated to go into storage at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona.
