more at
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24204/setting-the-record-straight-on-why-fighter-jets-cant-all-simply-fly-away-to-escape-storms
We have been leading the coverage on the state of aircraft left behind after
Hurricane Michael made a direct strike on the highly important Tyndall Air Force
Base. We have posted pictures showing QF-16s, Mu-2s, and yes, F-22s, sitting
among the rubble inside badly damaged hangars at the base. The USAF has stated
that aircraft were left behind, with unofficial figures being reported that
range from three to 18 of the precious super fighters riding out the storm on
site. Even though I repeatedly explained why not all aircraft can fly off in
advance of a storm's arrival, I have been inundated with tweets, Facebook
messages, emails, and comments ranging from people demanding to know how this
could have happened to being outraged that the commanders at the base didn't see
that all of the planes flew out and that they should face stiff punishments for
their actions. Some even claimed they should have been flown out on transport
planes. These are naive and in some cases absurd statements that are totally
divorced from the reality of tactical jet operations. Here's why.
At modern fighter is not a Honda Accord. You don't just hop in it and drive it
around for months until you finally have to take it for a one-hour oil change
when the light comes on. If anything, they are far more akin to high-end sports
cars that require a lot of expensive TLC to keep operating. The F-22, in
particular, is more analogous to an exotic supercar or even a high-end race car
than anything else. It requires dozens of hours of maintenance for every single
flight hour and deep maintenance can take days or even many weeks to accomplish,
depending on what is needed to be done and availability of spare parts, which
can be scarce.
On top of some aircraft being sidelined for extended periods of time for
repairs, others have to go through periodic planned servicing, discreet
component inspections, and invasive phase inspections, the latter of which sees
the aircraft largely disassembled before being arduously put back together and
flight tested before returning it to the active flight line after all its
issues, or 'gripes,' are worked out. In other words, many of these operations
are not ones you can simply stop and reverse to rapidly generate the aircraft
close. There are always a number of aircraft going through these planned
maintenance intervals, that way a squadron's inventory can remain fairly
predictable given the demands being placed upon it.
So it is not uncommon to have at least a handful of a unit's aircraft incapable
of flying due to foreseen maintenance, let alone unforeseen issues. That number
can actually grow higher based on the type, the age of the aircraft, and the
general readiness status of the aircraft's community overall.
on the planet. They had a snap readiness drill earlier in the year that
challenged them to get every jet airborne they could within 24 hours. This
resulted in 13 aircraft taking to the skies, including the unit's alert
aircraft, which was an awesome achievement they should be proud of. The wing has
21 aircraft assigned to it in total.
As I mentioned earlier, some military aircraft communities are better able to
cope with a sudden demand to generate flyable aircraft than others. If you have
been around a USMC or Navy Hornet squadron that is in a low-readiness period you
will see a lot of aircraft missing parts and sitting zombie-like on the flight
line or in the unit's maintenance hangars. Cannibalization of airframes for
parts, and in some cases not even to benefit the same unit's aircraft, is a very
common reality. You can read about this first hand in this past feature of ours.
This sorry state of affairs is slowly improving for the Navy and Marine Corps,
but it still has a long way to go before reaching traditional readiness targets,
let alone a new and arguably fantastical one Defense Secretary Mattis just set
for them. The USAF's 5th generation F-22 and F-35 fleets also suffer from
similar parts shortages and logistical logjams. An aircraft that had critical
components taken off of it to help keep another aircraft flying is not that
likely to be able to wing it out of an air base in a matter of a couple days as
a storm moves into the region.
The F-22 fleet, in particular, sits at the lowest readiness rate across the USAF
fast-jet inventory. There are a number of contributing factors to this,
including the type's short production run that pretty much everyone regrets in
hindsight. But as of 2017, the F-22 community as a whole struggled to meet a 50
percent mission capable rate. Their legacy fighter predecessors fared better at
generally above 70 percent.
55 of the stealth fighters on hand, as well as the home to many other
F-22s in the air. And the very idea that those that lead elite fighter units
don't care enough about preserving the jets they have under their purview is
simply outrageous. Trust me, anyone at a command level in the USAF fighter
community cares plenty about their aircraft. If you think otherwise then you
haven't spent much time around these types of individuals or the culture they
operate in.
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Yes, F-22s are a woefully scarce and finite commodity within the USAF. Any loss,
or even damage, to a Raptor is a significant event that has a real impact on the
total force. But there is no getting around it, there will likely be substantial
losses of not just Raptors but also T-38A Talon aggressors and Mu-2 radar
operator training aircraft, not to mention QF-16s, due to Michael. When it comes
to the QF-16s, the USAF spent millions per airframe turning those jets into
full-scale aerial targets (FSATs) fairly recently. They can fly for years with
or without a pilot in the cockpit after going through that conversion, so losing
a number of them is not just some trivial thing and those airframes are badly
needed for critical weapons testing and development purposes.
The harsh truth is that fighter aircraft are not 737s, they don't just reliably
churn out hours upon hours of flight time without a major issue. They are
finicky, maintenance intensive, and comparatively unreliable thoroughbred
fighting machines that spend far more time on the ground broken than in the
complex they are the less consistent they are operationally speaking. So save
the outrage over F-22s left behind at Tyndall and let's discuss solutions to
what will clearly be an increasingly common and crushingly expensive issue to
contend with in the future.
more at
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24204/setting-the-record-straight-on-why-fighter-jets-cant-all-simply-fly-away-to-escape-storms
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