USAF: F-22s Are Just Too Damn Expensive To Train In

[unhappycamper]

T-38 to Supplement F-22 Training
April 06, 2011
Air Force News|by Airman 1st Class Jason J. Brown

According to Lt. Col. Derek Wyler, the 1st OG Adversary Air Program lead, the program provides adversary support for training scenarios. The T-38s will serve in a "red air," or enemy capacity, while F-22s will fly as "blue air," or friendly forces. Each T-38 can be flown as often as three times daily to provide adversary support at a fraction of the cost of launching a Raptor.

[TexasProgresive]

1. Read the article-have a question

2 actually:
Any idea why the high cost of flying the Raptor, maintenance or what?
Is the T-38 the same trainer that has been around for 40 years?

[unhappycamper]

3. answers

The Raptor has had ongoing problems since the United States started buying them. Corrosion and computer problems are two of the biggies. Most warplanes require 'x' hours of maintenance for every hour flown. I suspect maintenance for the F-22 is higher than normal but I can't say for sure.

The T-38 has been around for 50 years.

[Motown_Johnny]

6. claims of 30 hours maintenance per hour flown......( $44,000 per hour flown)

But I don't know how reliable the site is. I didn't correct the misspellings in the article. To me this shows that it is a questionable source, but maybe they have a defective spell check somewhere. They even got defense wrong.

http://www.domain-b.com/aero/20090711_maintenance_nightmare_oneView.html


^snip^



With a whistleblower lawsuit against Lockheed Martin grabbing headlines for making the startling allegation that the US Air Force's top-of-the-line fighter, the F-22 Raptor, has been supplied defective stealth coatings, further information is now emerging from Pentagon sources that the F-22 programme is indeed the source of substantial worry for the defence establishment.

Internal documents, as well as Pentagon officials, reveal that Lockheed Martin's F-22 now requires more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour that it spends in the skies. This adverse ratio effectively pushes its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, which easily outstrips the cost of keeping other fighters in the skies – those which the Raptor is meant to replace.

Seemingly lending credence to whistleblower ex-employee Darrol Olsen's claims, that the company knowingly used "coatings that Lockheed knew were defective," are reports that not only are these coatings susceptible to peeling off but also that they are vulnerable to rains and other abrasion. Olsen claims that Lockheed covered up its problem with defective coatings by applying 272kg (600lb) worth of extra layers.

[anarch]

7. LOL British spellings

I have a couple MS Word template documents that have the British version of the spell checker on...they constantly try to correct me when I don't spell things like "centre" and "defence". Or "programme" for that matter.

Anyways, the F-22 is clearly way overpriced, as far as defence programmes go.

[Motown_Johnny]

8. Damn them, why can't they speak English properly?!?!?

:sarcasm:

[mwooldri]

13. Cos they're from India.

Really. That site is an Indian business site, aimed at the global business scene.

[SoCalDem]

2. It's our military's version of Granny's front-room

where the brand new plastic covered furniture is.. Oh so pretty, but no one's allowed in that room:)

[hack89]

4. Misleading OP

The T-38s fly against the F-22s - they play the enemy. Because they are cheaper to fly you need fewer of them. I think your hatred of the military is clouding your reading comprehension.

[unhappycamper]

5. I don't 'hate' our military.

I don't like what is being done in our name, nor do I like what these military expenditures are doing to our economy.

I am not a fan of war, and my reading comprehension is just fine.

[hack89]

12. But your OP is all about the Air Force finding ways to save money

by not flying expensive planes when they don't need to. Why is that a bad thing.

[tonybgood]

9. What then is clouding yours?

If the F-22 is so expensive to fly that you can't be trained in it, there is a problem. If the plane has defective coating, it's a problem. If contractors have not delivered aircraft as specified by DoD, there is a problem. By the way, you don't understand the US tactical situation, either. American pilots train against a numbers disadvantage in the air. That would mean you would need MORE T-38s to play the enemy. In a real situation, do you think the enemy will be flying 50 yr. old planes? If we've paid for a plane that can't do what it's tasked to do because it's defective and can't be deployed in the numbers necessary to provide for the common defense,WE HAVE A PROBLEM!!! If the American taxpayer is going to pay the money, we want what we paid for!!!

[hack89]

11. But the article doesn't say it is too expensive to train in

they are not flying the T-38s instead of F-22. They are flying the T-38s to train F-22 in dissimilar air to air combat. The Air Force also uses F-16 and F-15s for the same role.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64th_Aggressor_Squadron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65th_Aggressor_Squadron

The OP says nothing about the F-22 being too expensive to train in - what it says is the air force is trying to save money where and when they can. I don't see that as a problem.

[tuckessee]

10. Time to eliminate the Air Force.

Give it back to the Army. You think we would've learned the lesson of the Luftwaffe but no.....

This reminds me of the early Vietnam era when the USAF was too cheap to train their pilots in aerial dogfight tactics. They got their asses kicked so badly by the Vietnamese that USAF pilots were ordered not to engage in dogfights with the enemy. The Navy and Marines, however, weren't too cheap to adequately train their pilots and subsequently they performed exceptionally well in combat. The USAF's accident rate back then also reflected their shoddy training.

This kind of shit will come back to bite us if we ever get in real war against enemies who have weapons larger than RPG's. But if we're going to stick to thugging hapless Third World countries then we'll be fine.

[mwooldri]

14. What was stated in the OP I fully agree with.

To me, it makes sense to train in much less expensive hardware first before being let loose on the big guns. AFAIK most airforces do just this - how many Hawker Hunter planes are out there in operation??? Lots.

Personally I think the USAF should acquire some Eurofighters - because they appear to be cheaper and more capable... but I think Boeing and Lockheed Martin would have kittens if the USAF were to place an order for some Eurofighters.

[Ellipsis]

15. They're beautiful aerodynamically.