After dominating the medium-lift military tactical market for decades, the company's turboprop C-130J Hercules, upon which the LM-100J is based, is facing new competition from Embraer's KC-390 turbofan transport. In response, Lockheed Martin's Hercules is flexing its muscles and showing off its strengths.
"At the Farnborough air show, one of the key highlights we wanted to do with the demonstration was to show its manoeuvrability," says Tony Frese, Lockheed Martin’s vice-president of business development for air mobility & maritime missions. "That manoeuvrability, that responsiveness, pays off at the tactical role."
Lockheed Martin might have good reason to feel uneasy about the C-130J's position in the tactical airlift market. Just weeks before Farnborough, on 5 July 2018, Embraer announced that it intended to market and sell its KC-390 through a joint venture with Boeing. Embraer also plans to use the American company's leverage over suppliers to cut the cost of parts and components.
However, it's Lockheed Martin's market to lose. Some 21% of military transports in operation at the beginning of 2019 were Lockheed Martin C-130/ L-100s, according to FlightGlobal's World Air Forces Directory. The next closest competitors, the Beechcraft King Air and Airbus C295/CN235 families, each held just 7% of the world fleet.
Embraer's KC-390 wouldn’t be the first aircraft to try to knock off the Hercules.
"The C-130 has always been there. People have been afraid to challenge it. People have tried to nibble away at it and gotten beaten down," says Richard Aboulafia, vice-president of analysis at Teal Group. "The [Alenia] C-27J experience was probably as close as we've seen an attempt... The C-27J was put out there as effectively a half-sized C-130J. The problem was it was two-thirds of the price."
In fact, the military transportation market could shrink in the coming years. Teal Group projects that the market will reduce by some 42% to $3.62 billion by 2027. Total units produced across the market are projected to fall about 24% to 56 annually.
Compared with the hundreds of fighters and helicopters that roll off assembly lines each year, the military transport market is not big. Nonetheless, Embraer is determined to get a piece of it. The South American firm may have a chance.