OKLAHOMA CITY (OBV) — A six-year, $100 million digital engineering contract awarded out of the B‑1 System Program Office at Tinker Air Force Base is renewing a long-running complaint from Oklahoma industry advocates: the aircraft may be managed and sustained on Oklahoma soil, but research dollars, jobs, and intellectual property tied to modernization work can still flow out of state.
In March 2022, the B‑1 SPO at Tinker AFB awarded Wichita State University’s National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) a $100 million follow-on contract to continue the B‑1’s Digital Engineering transformation. The effort is aimed at digitizing legacy engineering data and building models intended to help the Air Force anticipate structural issues, speed repair development, and expand the pool of vendors capable of producing parts for the platform.
The partnership has since expanded, underscoring the scale of the work being performed outside Oklahoma’s higher-education system.
Over the past five years, NIAR and the Air Force have steadily widened the scope beyond a one-off modeling exercise into a repeatable sustainment R&D engine. Early work centered on building a “digital twin” by fully disassembling and scanning a retired B‑1 down to individual structural parts, using test data and flight data to validate models—an approach the Air Force and Wichita State described as a way to predict structural issues and prototype repairs virtually before metal is cut.
By 2024, the B‑1 SPO said the return on that approach was strong enough to justify lifting the contract ceiling to $200 million. Wichita State’s NIAR reported delivering more than 24,000 digital models and developing tools used to manage the fleet, including digital analysis that helped restore an aircraft to full capability while cutting return-to-service time by more than 50%.
NIAR has also built out infrastructure designed to attract and retain follow-on work. In 2023, Wichita State announced a retired KC‑135 had been delivered to NIAR to establish the STRATO‑T sustainment testbed near McConnell AFB—positioned as a place for government, industry and academia to test sustainment innovations and generate new digital models for legacy aircraft.
That same year, Wichita State said the Air Force sponsored a separate five‑year, $100 million cooperative agreement through NCMS to apply NIAR’s digital engineering work across multiple legacy platforms, including completing digital twins for the F‑16 and B‑1 and supporting sustainment and modifications for the B‑52 and C‑130. Wichita State also said NIAR’s digital engineering team employed about 400 technicians, engineers, inspectors and program managers, with more than half in applied-learning student roles.
Taken together, the publicly announced ceilings and agreements alone add up to at least $300 million tied to Wichita State’s NIAR for digital engineering work supporting Air Force sustainment—capital, workforce and institutional know-how Oklahoma stakeholders say the state must be able to compete against.
For Oklahoma lawmakers and stakeholders pushing changes to the state’s tech transfer posture, the B‑1 example has become a case study in what they describe as “value leakage”: mission-critical sustainment and program management may be centered at Tinker, but the higher-margin digital engineering work—and the know-how it creates—can accumulate in other states.
Adam Maxey, State Chamber of Oklahoma vice president of government, said the B‑1 award illustrates what the bill is intended to address.
“When a six-year, nine figure sustainment modernization effort for a bomber program run out of Tinker is executed by an out-of-state institution, that’s a signal Oklahoma’s research and development framework isn’t competitive enough,” says Maxey.
“SB 1670 addresses that by pushing policies toward market-competitive inventor incentives and clearer ownership outcomes, and by requiring periodic reviews so we don’t fall behind peer states. If Oklahoma wants to land the next wave of Air Force sustainment projects, we must fix the rules that shape where the IP and the talent ultimately live.”
SB 1670 would direct the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education to ensure the system’s model policy includes a tiered system of ownership based on the amount of revenue generated from new technology and ensures that inventors are compensated “competitively to similarly situated institutions.”
The bill also adds aerospace and defense to the areas of technology the Regents’ policy should explicitly encourage, and it requires that the policy be reviewed every seven years to ensure competitiveness among peer institutions.
Supporters argue those changes matter because large-scale research and development programs can generate durable economic value beyond the initial contract—high-wage jobs, supplier networks, licensing pathways, and proprietary datasets that can shape who wins the next round of modernization work.
In NIAR’s public descriptions of the B‑1 effort, the program is positioned as a readiness enabler that reduces sustainment friction by delivering digital models and tools intended to accelerate repairs and broaden manufacturing options for parts and components.
Maxey said Oklahoma already anchors the operational mission. The challenge is capturing more of the R&D, intellectual property, and commercialization that follow sustainment modernization.
“If Oklahoma is going to be the home of the Air Force sustainment depot, we should also be building the IP and talent base that pairs with modernization efforts aimed at enhancing our national security,” Maxey said. “SB 1670 is about making sure our universities and researchers have competitive incentives and clear ownership outcomes so the next research and development opportunity, the workforce that comes with it, and the long-term value it creates, has a reason to stay and scale here.”
SB 1670 passed the House Postsecondary Education policy committee April 7.
