USAF buys old airplanes

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury) 05/14/2020 at 19:00 • Filed to: None

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I’m not complaining at all. More aerospace jobs here in STL is a good thing IMO. I can’t believe that the F-15 has been flying for almost 50 years now; all of a sudden the B-52 doesn’t seem quite as old, with the last one delivered just 12 years before the first F-15 was.

This seems like a cost-effective way to do some of the heavy lifting that the F-35 can’t. Sometimes you just need brute force instead of subtlety .

benn454 > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 05/14/2020 at 19:19

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 The Eagle will still paste 90% of the competition, so why not.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > benn454 05/14/2020 at 19:21

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Precisely. Let the F-35s go in first where stealth is needed and then clean up with the F-15s. A very cost-effective choice as far as I’m concerned.

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 05/14/2020 at 19:23

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The big advantage is the ex can act as a missile truck, stand off, send in  the f35s to identify targets and lob missiles in.

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 05/14/2020 at 19:39

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They keep hinting we’ll build more F22s too.  Go Figger.

Stapleface-Now Hyphenated! > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 05/14/2020 at 19:42

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You've got to think at this point that the F15 is as cheap as it's gonna get. They've been around forever, still work, and I imagine pretty much any USAF mechanic knows how to fix one at this point. Until it is proven to be a liability in combat why wouldn't they keep using them?

NKato > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 05/14/2020 at 20:02

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Which is going to cost more than what it did to maintain the F-35's development and production cycle. They had to tear down the tooling for the F-22, remember? Restarting that is going to cost a fuckton of money.

ttyymmnn > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 05/14/2020 at 20:03

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Stealth isn’t the answer to everything. They should have made a lot more F-22s, but that ship has sailed. Now we need numbers, and the Eagle is still a very capable airframe. When I was a kid, my friend and I argued over which was the better plane, the F-14 or the F-15. I was in the F-15 camp, and while I understand now that the planes had very different missions, which one is still flying today?

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SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > NKato 05/14/2020 at 20:11

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Yeah, it seems a little disjointed, especially since we seem to be “rationing” hours and cycles on The BONEs for budget and planning pressures. Different missions, but same big (but limited) bucket of money. So, it’s a little hard to fathom F15X buys, more F22s, ongoing F35A/C...

I hope somebody has the plan distilled to a Powerpoint slide.

InFierority Complex > ttyymmnn 05/14/2020 at 20:15

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Both of them are still flying tho. :P

ttyymmnn > InFierority Complex 05/14/2020 at 20:20

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The Iranian F-14s are held together with spit and bailing wire. 

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 05/14/2020 at 20:21

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This. The number of places and times you need a fifth generation fighter over a fourths is still pretty limited, and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future. A fourth generation/ plus fighter still takes care of most work out there.

InFierority Complex > ttyymmnn 05/14/2020 at 20:31

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I was just being a smartass.

ttyymmnn > InFierority Complex 05/14/2020 at 20:31

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I know, but it’s still pretty amazing that those things are flying at all.

chaozbandit > ttyymmnn 05/14/2020 at 20:32

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Modernized F4s aren’t far off the ball either, but they’ve fallen very much into derelict fleets.

facw > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 05/14/2020 at 20:34

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I doubt that. The estimates I’ve seen are ~$10B restart costs (and I’d expect that to go over). So you’d really need to build a lot to make it worthwhile. And of course Lockheed also makes the F-35, so there’s not a lobbying push like there would be if it were another player (like say Boeing lobbying for more F-15 sales).

With 6th generation fighters under development, I’m pretty sure the F-35 will be considered good enough, even though it’s no F-22.

facw > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 05/14/2020 at 20:41

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Don’t like it. I mean, I fully believe that we don’t need every fighter to be a top of the line 5th generation fighter, but given that we are no longer looking at the F-15 as a top end air superiority fighter, we could easily be buying cheaper (and cheaper to operate) F-16s instead.

This mostly feels like a lifeline for Boeing , which in addition to all the well publicized issues, is seeing both the F-15 and Super Hornet rapidly approaching the end of their runs.

ttyymmnn > chaozbandit 05/14/2020 at 20:41

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And we could have had the Super Duper Tomcat . But we got the F/A-18 instead. 

SBA Thanks You For All The Fish > facw 05/14/2020 at 20:48

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You should check with this guy... /s/

https://oppositelock.kinja.com/time-to-restart-f-22-production-1829723235

It gets floated from time to time, but the costs seem prohibitive.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-cant-america-just-build-more-f-22-stealth-fighters-94221

thatsmr > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 05/14/2020 at 20:54

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And while we are busy finding better ways to kill people, the planet has thrown up its middle finger

ttyymmnn > SBA Thanks You For All The Fish 05/14/2020 at 20:57

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I’m not seeing any F-22s in our future. It’ll cost too much to get the line going again. Damned shortsighted to stop in the first place. 

ttyymmnn > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 05/14/2020 at 20:58

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That’s basically how we did it in Iraq. 

Chariotoflove > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 05/14/2020 at 21:18

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This really makes me wonder why they ever built the F-22 in the first place.

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > Chariotoflove 05/14/2020 at 21:52

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50 years of cold war one upmanshipment, meant by the 90s we had better start cracking on a new design. Into the late 80s and to the end of the USSR there were rumors of them working on a new fighter. As money got tight at the end and in the 90s they tried to rope in other countries, eventually roping in India for a bit in 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-57

Also the first gulf war showed how great stealth was and how great would it be if a significant amount of your aircraft was steathly. 

ttyymmnn > gmporschenut also a fan of hondas 05/14/2020 at 22:07

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Also the first gulf war showed how great stealth was and how great would it be if a significant amount of your aircraft was steathly.

It also helped that we were going up against Iraq. This looks like an interesting read. Though there is a chance we will be going up against Russia or China at some point in the future, we’re dropping a lot more bombs on places that don’t require stealth. Investing in a couple hundred high-performance bomb trucks may be just the right thing to do at this time.

Chariotoflove > gmporschenut also a fan of hondas 05/14/2020 at 22:21

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So we built the most advanced air superiority fighter, then cancelled it and now we are buying more of the ones it was supposed to replace. 

coqui70 > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 05/14/2020 at 22:49

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Actually the Eagle will get there first because ... its faster than Lightning! Afterburn!!!

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > ttyymmnn 05/14/2020 at 22:56

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_variants_of_Soviet_military_equipment#Effectiveness_of_monkey_models

I agree with your statement. The only asterisk is the US didn’t fully know what they would be going up against in the first gulf war. the problem you get into is the rock paper scissors. A super t ucano can bomb a hillside compou nd all day, but youre not putting that up against a state adversa ry, yet a f35 is overkill. 

Overall, t he problem is you have to prepare for both. Think the crazy number of aircraft the US was building to countering the soviets. And when you look at troop levels, vietnam was still “only” 549k personel. Given teh age of most of the generals, starting in ww2 it could be understandable of htem being a bit of target fixation. Not keeping a substantial wing of the DoD focused after is negligence.

I think a good comparison would be naval buildup before ww1. The germnans spent a fuckton of money building a fleet of battleships before stopping and switching to uboats. without the BBs, the royal navy would have run roughshod over the coast, or they could counter the BBs by sinking the supply merchant ships. Their roles complement each other.

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > Chariotoflove 05/14/2020 at 22:58

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yeah. Like the A380 we read the market wrong, as well as taking on massive development cost overruns .

chaozbandit > ttyymmnn 05/15/2020 at 07:45

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*cries in Super Arrow *