Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
Look, you're the expert, and I bow to that, You're more current and up to date on this stuff.
I think this is stupid to spend money like this on those airframes. Maybe you can help me out on the deeper questions that I have
1) These are about 40 year old airframes, what's the actual life span on an airframe on a high performance fighter.
2) I've been reading about a shortage of pilots anyways, we have 80 fighters and we can't keep them in the air.
3) Why would we only be doing these upgrades on 36 out of the 80 fighters
4) Even with the capability upgrades, where does this place the F-18's in terms of current fighter capability.
5) I was watching a video the other night that talks about the next failure point in our fleet being the hardware systems, landing gear and control surfaces wear and tear.
I was reading that the F-35 costs are dropping as production ramps up, I think the last cost I read was $90 million per plane for the A variant so a fleet of 88 would be about $ 8 billion. Does it make sense to spend 10% of that to upgrade half the fleet.
I've read that the cost on the Super Hornet is at 70 million per plane and the JAS-39E is theoretically going to be about $60 million or more per cost.
Spending 10% of the outlay on a new fleet to upgrade half the fleet of aged F-18's is incredibly stupid to me, and frankly what this means is the Liberals will punt the procurement of a new fleet down the road by more then half a decade.
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Part of the reason for the pilot shortage was they were losing pilots to the airlines, partly due to the fact funding has been cut so badly they were hardly getting any flying hours. The funding part is easy to fix if the Feds had the balls to put some $$$ into our forces. And now the threat of losing people to the airlines is greatly reduced due to Covid layoffs. It's a golden opportunity to keep our pilots and solve this problem if we actually had some aircraft they could fly and the money to operate them.
I'm hearing that the pilot drain from the US military has almost entirely stopped too now that civilian opportunities have evaporated.