The F-16 in my opinion is the best fighter in the world. Oh sure, it doesn’t have the best specs on anything. But it’s a helluva dogfighter, it’s cheap, it’s low maintenance, (half the engines of an F-15 means half the maintenance costs there!), it hauls plenty of ordinance, if it were a motorcycle it’d be a Japanese sportbike rather than a Ducati. Performance-wise the Japanese sportbike will do pretty much everything the Ducati will do, while costing half as much and requiring half the maintenance and being significantly more reliable. There really is no compelling reason to keep the F-15 in our fleet, other than as welfare for Boeing — it costs over $3m *apiece* per year in maintenance costs to keep each F-15 in the air. Lockheed can turn out F-16’s for under $20M in quantity. Huh.
]]>The 33rd Fighter Wing, which is local, spends most if its time back here checking the aircraft that were deployed, because they don’t have the equipment in-country to do all of the testing or maintenance.
Occasionally one of their birds will come back in shipping containers because it can’t be repaired in theater.
The F-22 sure isn’t ready for prime time, hell, half the vehicles and equipment over there isn’t worth shipping home it’s so beat up by the sand.
F-16s are still being built, and we should be buying them to replace what’s getting used up, because there is no fighter challenge, and ground attack is the mission.
When we are finally out, they will shed pilots, just like they did after the first Gulf War, because there won’t be any planes left for them to fly.
]]>Airframe fatigue is not a maintenance problem. If it was an engine problem, that’d be a maintenance problem. Airframe fatigue is a sign of overuse. Estimating airframe life is an art, not a science. Now, an airframe *crashing* due to airframe fatigue may be a maintenance issue — from time to time a fighter is supposed to be withdrawn from duty and stripped down and its airframe completely analyzed to see what its stress levels look like and what its projected remaining airframe life is likely to be. But even that’s not 100% accurate, especially for a small-production heavily-stressed jet like an F-15, where there are only 335 of the “new” ones in service and many of them are approaching 20 years old.
In short, this is yet another case of the Busheviks going to war on the cheap. The moment the decision to go to war was made, the production lines should have been cranked up for whatever jet fighters were necessary to fight the wars that Rumsfeld wanted to fight. Instead, we’re using the same tired fighters that were already aging before the start of the war… with predictable results. (At least the Navy has their new Superbugs, but the Navy ain’t fightin’ in Afghanistan — sorta a lack of ocean there :-0).
]]>This is truly scary, because it undercuts the confidence in the systems that really form the backbone of defense.
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