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Posted on 04/17/2011 6:31:10 AM PDT by Racehorse
A well-maintained plane can fly for decades. Older planes do need more repairs, but experts say an aircraft's age never has been the cause of a passenger death. Pilot training and fatigue, as well as frequency of aircraft maintenance, are larger safety issues.
The average age of jets flown by U.S. airlines is 11 years old, slightly above the world average of 10 but far shy of the 28 for Venezuela's fleet — the oldest of any country with more than a handful of jets.
Theoretically, a jet could continue flying indefinitely as long as an airline maintained it, says Bill Voss, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation. The costs eventually would be prohibitive, though. Deciding when to mothball an airplane is usually a matter of the economics of the individual airline.
Older planes need more frequent inspections, and bigger and costlier repairs. That means less time in the sky carrying paying passengers. Besides being cheaper to maintain, newer planes offer substantial fuel savings, and passengers enjoy features such as personal TVs.
“Aircraft become impractical a long time before they become unsafe,” Voss says.
SNIP
Age isn't the only factor when it comes to safety. Each takeoff and landing cycle — and the pressurization and depressurization associated with it — adds stress to the skin of the plane. Aircraft that fly short, frequent routes go through more of these cycles than planes flying long distances. In 1988, a 19-year-old Aloha Airlines Boeing 737-200 that had made frequent, short hops among the Hawaiian islands lost a large part of its roof. Corrosion and metal fatigue were to blame.
(Excerpt) Read more at mysanantonio.com ...
“-I’m reminded of the days when we were going to haul Alan Cranston’s “nuclear freeze” in the B-1-”
Do you have to mention “The Cadaver”? I thought that name was gone for good...
Based on B-2 technology, it’s another sneek in, precision target airplane with high mainteneance vs flight hours. Sorry - we need another dump truck also, not pretty, not fast or sexy, just something high endurance to haul tons of bombs in a situation where we control the skies. Nothing says support to an FOB deep in indian country or recon team ambushed by a superior force like a hundred bombs saturating an area to disrupt and demoralize the enemy.
That’s why the A-10 is so popular, it can stick around and deliver repeated strikes as needed.
The Cessna 152 I solo’ed in back in 87 still flies today.
You oughta try it from the Buff's perspective. I did it in '73 as an ATC observer in the IP seat, flying out of Kincheloe to La Junta, CO for low level training. VERY senior crew, (I was accorded VIP treatment) consisted of 4 Majors with combat experience.
Screaming through canyons at 360 kts indicated, pilot's blast screen down - flying 200' terrain avoidance, watching sheep scatter on hillsides.
The mountain waves made the ride tremendously rough, like hitting a row of fence posts in a car at 100 mph. So rough at times you would momentarily lose visual acuity (could not read instruments), but the crew had been trained to deal with that.
This was in the days of SAC - it was a nuclear certified crew - and was by FAR the most professional operation I have ever seen.
I've been lucky enough to see and do some cool stuff, but that ride was certainly a highlight. And to add icing on the cake, after the run we went to altitude & got our scoring, then the Pilot says "Damn, pretty good (it actually was an extremely high score I learned later), let's see if we can beat it".
The beating those airframes take is astounding, it's simply unbelievable they could have such long lifespans.
This may not be a popular idea on here, but commercial aircraft crash due to design/engine/whatever flaws a lot less since the 90’s designs. The earlier stuff like the DC-10’s used to blow apart in the air due to crappy design a lot more.
I don’t fly, but if I did I’d want something new.
They promised the Moon with the Shuttle, didn’t they?
Yes they are called “D Checks”
Northwest (now Delta) will have all their DC-9s retired by mid-2012 if not earlier.
Long overdue. American needs to get rid of their crappy/noisy MD-80’s as well. Any idea when those will be gone?
Also, the NGLRB will be able to haul tons over great distances as well as survive a high-threat environment we do not yet control.
Fighting your way in is costly. Gulf War I proved the effectiveness of smart targeting, smart weapons and LO platforms to deliver the effects. That is what the NGLRB will deliver. With NGLRB there will be no need for hundreds of aircraft to support the deep strike. Talk about cost, hundreds of aircraft that are engaged in a fight, cost to men and the mission is very high. Why do that when a NGLRB would be able to operate alone and go deep?
We have the “dump truck” (the F-15E and B-52). The B-52 is old and needs replacing, but in the times of small budgets you simply cannot afford to build a single-mission jet. No way.
Sorry, makes no sense to build dump trucks when they can't get to the target unless supported by hundreds of sorties (if not thousands over a day or so to make way) and or saturation of the skies.
Besides, you, as a pilot, would YOU want to fly the dump truck, knowing you are shining like a flashlight in the dark, easy to spot and shoot-down? Imagine this conversation: “Yeah, Captain, we know, we could have bought the good stuff and been as good as we can be and you could be going in there and no one would be the wiser, but we decided to buy dump trucks so we could be only as good as the threat and overwhelm them with numbers. Anyway, group with your buddies and play the odds.”
The NGLRB is not based on B-2 technology any more than, say, the F-22 is based upon wright-brother technology. I wager you have not seen the AOA and have no real knowledge of the direction the platform is taking. I have. Not to play a game with you, not my point as anyone can claim anything on the net. I am just pointing out that the NGLRB will not be what you think it will be. . . it will be lots better.
The A-10 is popular because it can deliver ordinance in a tactical environment and affect the immediate tactical battle. Multiple passes are needed in the CAS environment, not the deep strike environment, and take a look at what happened to the A-10’s when they went “deep into Indian country” in Gulf War I. Not pretty.
Our targeting is to achieve effects, not to bounce rocks. . .no matter how satisfying that is. Why blow up each cantonment area when dropping a single bridge or two cuts them off, takes them out of the fight? Less exposure to the threat, less risk to the pilots and aircraft, more effective in stopping the threat. We are smarter than the enemy, no matter who he is.
You fly each sortie in support of a specific objective, and objective that can trace it lineage up to the over-all pol-mil objective, and bouncing rocks is not one of them.
While the B-52 , B-1 and B-2 were designed as strategic bombers, dropping a JDAM on a suspected Al-Queda meeting in a small village is not a “conventional” strategic mission.
Unless you are planning on bombing China or Russia, most of the worlds Air Forces are toast within 72 hours of the US beginning ops against them. And initial strikes are usually B-2’s, Cruise Missiles and F-117’s these days. Follow ons are F-15’s F-18’s ect. Then we tend to stay in a country for at least a decade.. ( see bosnia, iraq ,afghanistan, germany, japan, korea, vietnam, puerto rico ect..)Where we rule the skies. And if you remember in afghanistan, it was b-52 dumb iron that broke the taliban’s back when the northern front was advancing with special ops assistance.
Not as much stress as when the cabin becomes depressurized :-)
The overall rate over the past two years has been 3 MD80s retired for every 5 737-800s delivered. Some months, there were a few months, no MD80s were retired despite some 737-800 deliveries. I heard they should be all gone by 2015.
—he was one of my senators, Moonbeam was governor and Dianne Feinstein became my mayor—unforgettable—
I recently purchased a Cessna 416 (same type which I got my multi-rating 30 years ago) that was built in 1976 and recently refurbished in Warner-Robbins GA. I’ll put her airframe up against any new aircraft of similar type built and guarantee she’s stronger and better constructed. Back then the people who built her in Kansas actually gave a damn about their jobs and the quality of their work instead of their union benefits and pensions, which were considered perks for a job well done. The great thing about older aircraft is that any mfg. flaws or other anomalies will have shown themselves years ago. Just update the powerplants and the avionics and you have yourself a sweet little ride at a fraction of the price for a new one, and with money left over you can have the cabin outfitted to look like a G5
First thing, the F-117 has been retired for quite a while so please drop it from your inventory..
JDAM is a fine precision weapon, as is the SDB I and soon-to-be SDB-II.
Both allow the precision to engage accurately and not blow up all sorts of dirt just because we can. They are not dropped without precise coordinated loaded. Not a carpet-bombing weapon.
Operationally, what is tactical versus strategic, that is a subject where the grey intrudes. Is the meeting of senior leaders affecting the strategic direction of the effort? Are they generals plotting their next “campaign?” If so, the target is strategic, not tactical. The B-2 was used because it could carry a lot of JDAM at one time.
That is a good thing, as the B-2 filled a void, a void that proved it is more than a single mission aircraft.
It can be used conventionally as well as strategically in whatever mission presents itself. It can use nukes or JDAM, and it can be used to effect entry into denied airspace or effect entry into open airspace. That is its strength. It is more than a simple dump-truck. It is a multi-role aircraft able to span the conflict spectrum.
Complex aircraft take decades to design and then even begin LRIP. Then it takes years after to fully produce and go IOC. This means we are looking at, easily, 30-yrs before any new platform will be available for the mission at hand.
In 30-yrs, I think the threat picture will be much different than today and we must be as good as we can be, not as good as the adversary we face today. Sadly, many short-sighted people in congress think we will only the fight the war we have and not engage in anything different. That type of thinking places great risk on this great nation.
The scenarios you list are very good, as they support my case. Thank you.
The scenarios demonstrate wonderfully how vastly different the environment we may find ourselves operating in. Deserts to jungle, to hills with trees to flat-lands of open plains. We have to be ready, and one thing is for sure, owning the skies is critical.
To do that we need jets like the F-22 (and its follow on) to the B-2 and its follow on. These jets can give us the edge we need to fight an enemy we may not even recognize today (or exisits today), as well as give us the ability to deliver the effects we need to deliver, nuclear to conventional, in contested airspace or not.
And the threat nations we know of today are still building, doing R&D, and moreover, selling that kit to the highest bidder. So, we may find ourselves engaged with a bad-guy we had not anticipated and he might be shooting back with kit that is better than we have-—simply because we want to build dump-trucks and had the arrogance than no one will ever be as good as we are.
That would be a severe miscalculation.
Appropriate technolgy... Not just technology for whiz bangs.
The wheels still around because it does the job. No one’s using a hovertank yet. The Air Force needs to be realistic. How many cancelled development programs can the taxpayers afford, because some one says “if only it would do this too”, and mission creep means it’s never fielded. Someone was farsighted enough to redesign the 1946 design into the B-52 which has been useful for way too many years. As you say the F117 has now been retired after less than 30 yrs. How long before the B-2 at a billion dollars a plane is retired ? If each B-2 drops less than 2000 bombs in it’s service life, it would have been cheaper to use Tomahawks.
So no retread tech, give me a unique design that will hold up for 50 yrs and not cost more that simply firing missiles and not putting American pilots, refueling planes, ground support personnel, rescue teams ect... at risk
Technology is better on both sides and we have designed and acquired other platforms that can do the job better, more effectively, with greater survivability.
Cost of airframes is a factor of cost-per-unit. If the B-2 was bought in the numbers it was originally planned for, the cost would have been less than half of what it was. Oh, it is nowhere near being fully retired. Count on it.
Same with the F-22.
So, with you on blaming congress for shorting the defense budget and raising costs for acquisitions. Short-sighted dolts that they are, they can never see their near-term “savings” resulted in wildly “over-priced” platforms.
Mission-creep is the result of congressional meddling mostly, as the companies and engineers are purists and design to spec. Adding additional capabilities raises the bid price and takes away from the spec and lowers the efficiencies of the platform.
Moreover, like I said, it adds COST, and no company wants to propose something the customer did not want and is more costly than RFP conditions demand. Other than price, uncalled for capabilities add nothing to your bid.
Call your congressman on this. Add my name to your call, as I agree with you; mission creep has got to go and we need better platforms to meet the ever-evolving threat.
Those dolts have no clue how R&D is done, how long it takes and how much it costs, and most especially, they have no idea how risky it is to contract with the USG for long-tern acquisitions, as the USG is the most unreliable customer out there and corporations/companies must include “risk” into their pricing, just to ensure they get paid back fast during the initial contract runs. Money to pay for the R&D and engineering, suppliers and manufacturing tooling must be paid for otherwise the infrastructure collapses.
All told, we need newer technologies and more capable platforms than the short-sighted dolts in congress feel we need.
Game-changing technologies are called “game-changing” for a reason. Game-changing technologies require a game-changing response, so your 1946 example, while interesting, is at best metaphorical and in no way can be applied when it comes to todays platforms and future threats and capabilities.
“give me a unique design that will hold up for 50 yrs”
Good luck with that, as technology changes daily, let alone over the course of 50-yrs. I’ll bet your computer has software upgrades all the time. So do the jets and they are built with an open architecture to make integration easier. . .but it still costs and it still takes time. . .but at some time, the ‘ol Commodore 64 has to be replaced.
Heck, if you know of a technology that will last 10-yrs in this world, let alone last 50-yrs, contact Lockheed Martin Skunk Works or Boeing’s Phantom Works. I am sure they will be willing to listen.
“. . . and not cost more that simply firing missiles and not putting American pilots, refueling planes, ground support personnel, rescue teams ect... at risk”
Sounds like you are an unmanned advocate, as that would be the only way to do that. For an unmanned platform to do what you suggest requires substantial investment and decades of effort.
Consider, in the short-or-near-term, we can’t field a 1-G, 25-knot, two-dimensional maneuvering unmanned tank on the battlefield, but yet we think we can develop and quickly deliver a hyper-G, hyper-Mach, 360-degree maneuvering autonomous/semi-autonomous platform capable of operating in uncontested and contested airspace, and survive such a place for the next 50-yrs.
I do have to differ with you on that one. . .if unmanned is what you are suggesting..
I am enjoying this but the wife-unit (Mod I, Ver 1) just called and I have duties to attend to. Check with you later.
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