I correct myself...F22 aircraft. No difference in my book though.
This storm blew in from nothing to a cat 4 hurricane in about 4 days. I Imagine the planes that were left behind we’re unable to be flown. You just can’t put a plane back together in four days if it’s being torn apart for maintenance
A couple of points; all fighter wings have aircraft that are dedicated maintenance trainers. Those jets almost never leave the ground, and many can’t, since (a) they’re used to teach wrench benders how to work on the aircraft and (b), they’ve likely been cannibalized to the point it would take months (and millions of dollars) to return them to operational service.
Likewise, every fighter unit I was assigned to had a certain number of “hangar queens,” jets with a long history of maintenance problems that spent far more time on the ground than in the air. Also worth noting that a certain number of “line” aircraft are undergoing phase maintenance at any given time and can’t be put back together in a matter of hours and flown to safety. And, you can’t just plop an F-22 on a lowboy trailer and haul it away, or remove the wings and load it into a C-5 or C-17.
So far, no one has offered a breakout on the damaged F-22s. You’d expect the maintenance trainers and hanger queens to stay behind, but the real question is how many “line” aircraft—the ones flown on a regular basis—were left at Tyndall because they were undergoing maintenance and couldn’t be repaired fast enough to evacuate.
The real issue here is the strength/availability of hangars at Tyndall and other bases. As a rule, there is never enough hangar space (it’s impractical to build hardened structures for 48 aircraft), but the USAF can expand what it has and build to CAT 5 standards in coastal areas.