Sometimes, the military comes up with some truly insane ideas — that work. What if you stuck an airport on a boat? Now, aircraft carriers rule the seas. Okay, what if you stuck a radar station on a plane? That gave us a type of aircraft that can detect enemies in the air and direct entire aerial battles.
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Air Force has used the E-3 for this purpose. Called the AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System), it is truly one of the strangest planes America’s military has ever flown. It sports an enormous rotating radar dish on its back, 30 feet in diameter, giving it a silhouette that’s instantly recognizable. Flying in pretty much every major conflict the U.S. has been involved in since its deployment, the AWACS is a staple of American airpower.
But its long watch is at last coming to an end. The AWACS uses a positively ancient airframe, the Boeing 707, which first flew in 1957 and no longer even flies commercially. That means parts are harder and harder to come by, and the cost of maintenance is skyrocketing, even as its once-peerless capabilities are becoming second-tier in the modern world. So the Air Force has already started to put them out to pasture, specifically by tossing them in the Boneyard.
What is the Boneyard?
The Boneyard is the nickname for Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. While the base plays host to a number of units, it’s most famous for being the home of the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group. Essentially, if the Air Force needs to take a plane out of flight rotation, it can send it to this team for storage, potentially repair, and if need be, long-term retirement.
With almost 3,200 aircraft on site, the Boneyard is the largest airplane graveyard in the world. The extremely arid desert air made it an ideal location for parking old planes, since humidity leads to rust and erosion. By storing the planes instead of destroying them, the Air Force could refit them for flight in an emergency; otherwise, the junk planes are a great source of parts, particularly for older airframes like the AWACS has.
Since 2023, the Air Force sent 14 AWACS to the Boneyard, taking them out of operational rotation, possibly forever. Another was left at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, the main hub for the plane, as a display. That leaves only 16 AWACS still flying for the United States, though NATO and other allies still fly their own as well.
What does an AWACS do?
The primary mission of the E-3 AWACS is to coordinate air battles and detect enemy aircraft and missiles. Essentially, the beating heart of the plane is that gigantic radar dish on the back, which can sweep for contacts up to 250 miles away. All of that information is then displayed to the crew, as many as 19 specialists, whose job it is to relay that information back out to other American or allied forces in the area. Recently, NATO has been flying the AWACS to detect Russian bombing flights and missile launches against Ukraine so it can make sure the conflict doesn’t spill over the border into NATO countries.
Far more than simply a source of information, the AWACS is also an airborne command and control center, able to direct an entire air battle if need be. It can also assist ground commanders by advising them of what the enemy has in the air.
What is the E-7 that may replace the AWACS?
As mighty as the E-3 AWACS once was, it has started to show its age. The aircraft are decades old, parts for its archaic Boeing 707 airframe are getting harder to come by, and worst of all, its signature radar dish is no longer top of the line. A full sweep of an area takes 10 seconds; in other words, if there’s a specific enemy plane or missile you want to track, you’re only going to get an update every 10 seconds. That’s an eternity in the heat of combat.
So in 2023, the Pentagon announced that it had ordered Boeing E-7s to replace them. The E-7 is based on the 737 airframe (even though the 737 MAX has been a headache for Boeing), still in operation around the world today. Parts are plentiful, in other words. More importantly, it trades the bulky radar dish for a linear piece called the multirole electronically scanned array. This can lock onto one or more targets to track, rather than having to wait for a dish to sweep around.
This is the military, however, and nothing happens quickly. So even though the plane is already operational in several allied air forces, the U.S. doesn’t expect to get prototypes until fiscal year 2028. The plan was to get 26 of the finalized versions by 2032, but now the Trump administration is reviewing budget priorities, and the whole project could be scoped back or even scrapped.
The future of battle management
If the Pentagon does proceed with acquiring them, the U.S. Air Force versions of the E-7 ought to be the pinnacle of airborne early warning and battle management. In fact, it’s possible that they will hold on to that distinction forever. That’s because the future of this mission isn’t airborne at all — it’s orbital.
Somewhere around a decade from now, the goal is for this kind of real-time information gathering, sharing, and coordinating to be handled by vast constellations of small satellites across both low-Earth orbit and medium-Earth orbit. If those plans are successful, these satellites could render the planes redundant. Why wait for a plane to taxi to the runway, take off, and fly all the way to the battle when you already have a network of satellites overhead all the time?
Then again, redundancy is never a bad thing in battle, where assets get shot down all the time. The Pentagon may well like keeping airborne capabilities around as a backup. The E-3 AWACS has been flying for 50 years; so if they ever fly at all, there’s no reason to think the E-7 couldn’t be, too.
