A Boeing F-15K Slam Eagle departs St. Louis for delivery to South Korea on March 8, 2011. (Ron Bookout/Boeing)
The Defense Department approved a $2.8 billion, 11-year hybrid contract with Boeing to modify F-15K Slam Eagle fighters for the South Korean air force, the Pentagon announced Friday.
The contract calls for “design and development of an integrated suite of aircraft systems” as part of overall modernization of the Slam Eagles, the South Korean variant of the F-15 Eagle fourth-generation fighter.
The U.S. government, which acts as a go-between, paying the contractor and collecting from South Korea, advanced $540 million under the contract as part of the Foreign Military Sales program.
Boeing delivered the first of 40 Slam Eagles to Seoul in October 2005. It contracted for another 21 aircraft in April 2008, according to a company news release in April 2012.
Boeing, which merged with the F-15’s original manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997, did not compete for the sole source acquisition contract.
The hybrid contract announced Friday combines several contract types, according to information posted online by RMC Learning Solutions.
The cost-plus-fixed-fee agreement allows Boeing to bill for allowable costs like labor and materials while also collecting a negotiated fee as its profit.
A fixed-price incentive encourages Boeing to hold costs below a set cap by allowing the company to keep the resulting savings or pay for overruns from its profit.
Under an “undefinitized” contract, Boeing may start work immediately while final details are worked out. The contract deadline is Dec. 31, 2037.
Most of the work will be done at Boeing’s plant in St. Louis, where it is planning a 1.1-million-square foot expansion of its Defense, Space and Security unit, according to a June report on the ENR Midwest engineering news website.
The Slam Eagle derives from the U.S. Air Force F-15E and is designed as a long-range, multirole fighter capable of all-weather missions, according to Boeing.
The U.S. State Department signed off in November 2024 on a $6.2 billion package of Slam Eagle improvements, including high-speed mission system computers; Active Electronically Scanned Arrays, or AESA, radars; missile-warning systems and continued maintenance and software support, according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which manages the Foreign Military Sales program.
