Air Force grounds entire fleet of F-15s

Source: Boston Globe/LA Times

Air Force grounds entire fleet of F-15s
Move in response to plane breaking in midair last week

By Peter Spiegel, Los Angeles Times | November 6, 2007

WASHINGTON - The US Air Force has grounded its entire fleet of F-15s, the service's premier fighter aircraft, after one of the planes disintegrated over eastern Missouri during a training mission, raising the possibility of a fatal flaw in the aging fighters' fuselage that could keep it out of the skies for months.

General T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff, ordered the grounding Saturday after initial reports showed that the Missouri Air National Guard fighter plane broke apart Friday in midair during a simulated dogfight.

Although the 688 F-15s in the Air Force's arsenal gradually are being replaced by a new generation of aircraft - the F-22 - they remain the nation's most sophisticated front-line fighters. US officials said the F-15s are used heavily for protecting the continental United States from terrorist attack, as well as for combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lieutenant General Gary L. North, the Air Force officer in charge of military aircraft in the Middle East, issued a statement yesterday saying he would be able to fill the gap with other fighters and bombers. But another Air Force official said the F-15 grounding will have a "significant impact" on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read more: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/11/06/air_force_grounds_entire_fleet_of_f_15s/

So much for the superior nature of a Republican government's ability to enforce national security.

This administration is corrupted from top to bottom.

Everything is a clusterfuck.

And it's not by incompetence, it's by design.

As long as Cheney/Bush oversee the debilitation of our defenses & our rule of law, they facilitate the drive of the trans-national lobbies that have them in their pockets.

These "leaders" are certifiable traitors.

fall apart

calculated in such a way that the primaries & general election are influenced.

Especially where F-15's would be involved?

Or the terrorist state of madagascar.

using the planes and subs and aircraft carriers they have buried with them out in the desert somewhere

and make it into a bigger hole.

kettle of fish

or enameled?

This is out of control spending.

The Republican solution would be to starve it of funding and try to terminate it. I wonder what the Republican solution will be to a military problem where the machinery isn't working? Please choose from the following:

A. Throw more money at the problem.
B. Give no-bid contracts to politically-connected white guys.
C. Throw a LOT more money at the problem.
D. Cut health care spending.
E. All of the above.

You have 15 minutes. Please use a #2 pencil. Keep your eyes on your own paper. Begin.

After that, the per unit cost is supposed to drop to $120 million each for a production run of another 100, or so the prime contractors says. If we accept these numbers (sure we should, there's no such thing as cost overruns), therefore, the total cost of replacing the F-15 on a one-one basis would cost somewhere around $360 billion.

There's a lot of incentive in those numbers to show that the F-15 is a dangerous aircraft, unfit to fly.

!

:sarcasm:

flying in the pacific, cross the meridian, and have their nav computers totally crash, along with their comm link? I think this was August this year. They made it back to Hawaii, barely, and only because they spotted contrails from their refueling planes.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/f-15.htm

The F-15 initial operational requirement was for a service life of 4,000 hours. Testing completed in 1973 demonstrated that the F-15 could sustain 16,000 hours of flight. Subsequently operational use was more severely stressful than the original design specification. With an average usage of 270 aircraft flight hours per year, by the early 1990s the F-15C fleet was approaching its service-design-life limit of 4,000 flight hours. Following successful airframe structural testing, the F-15C was extended to an 8,000-hour service life limit. An 8,000-hour service limit provides current levels of F-15Cs through 2010. The F-22 program was initially justified on the basis of an 8,000 flight hour life projection for the F-15. This was consistent with the projected lifespan of the most severely stressed F-15Cs, which have averaged 85% of flight hours in stressful air-to-air missions, versus the 48% in the original design specification.

Full-scale fatigue testing between 1988 and 1994 ended with a demonstration of over 7,600 flight hours for the most severely used aircraft, and in excess of 12,000 hours on the remainder of the fleet. A 10,000-hour service limit would provide F-15Cs to 2020, while a 12,000-hour service life extends the F-15Cs to the year 2030. The APG-63 radar, F100-PW-100 engines, and structure upgrades are mandatory. The USAF cannot expect to fly the F-15C to 2014, or beyond, without replacing these subsystems. The total cost of the three retrofits would be under $3 billion. The upgrades would dramatically reduce the 18 percent breakrate prevalent in the mid-1990s, and extend the F-15C service life well beyond 2014.

The F-15E structure is rated at 16,000 flight hours, double the lifetime of earlier F-15s.

n/t

just curious how all of this conventional war machinary we throw BILLIONS into is better than intelligence?

For decades, America has depended on good intel and good conventional arms.

These days, we have neither.

I don't agree. Afghanistan is an excellent example that approach's failure.

Those overpriced spy satellites are *another* good example of technology that should be replaced with intelligence officers poring through data and a few quiet agents on the ground in countries like Pakistan.

how dare you not protect our troops by applying supercruise technology against those crafty - ahem - ragheads?

Remember that they are shelling the green zone, by bringing in horse and mule pulled carts into baghdad. Your traitorous position on the F-22 means that we may not be able to stop those carts until they've launched their attacks into our super safe embassy. I repeat, sheesh.

More Cold War hardware being used to fight an asymmetric conflict.

You could scramble fighter jets. Although, for some reason that doesn't always work...

Yeah, those fighter planes certainly did a boatload of good on 9/11. Protecting our airspace with jets is just a remnant of the Cold War. They are useless.

Our air defenses were not allowed up until after the Pentagon was hit with whatever hit it.

But the economy's good . . . honest.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."


"Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html

Perhaps a bit cynical, I dunno.

Source: USA Today

The U.S. Air Force has grounded its entire fleet of 700 Boeing Co F-15 aircrafts after one of the flying fighters crashed in Missouri on November 2.

Maj. John Elolf, a spokesperson for the U.S. Air Force Central Command said that the F-15Es would be allowed to fly only in emergency situations in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect U.S. and help coalition troops in the battle. F-15 military aircrafts are known to be in use since 1975 and officials said that they put in danger the life of people who commands them, CNN reports.

"They have become serious maintenance challenges as they get older, and now I'd suggest that we may be facing a crisis. We must recapitalize our aging fighter forces - and fast, Lieutenant General David Deptula said in a statement.

Air Force officials believe that the crashing aircraft might have disintegrated in the air in the Friday accident. The pilot successfully ejected from the aircraft before it crashed suffering non-threatening life injuries.

. . .

Loren Thompson a military analyst with the Lexington Institute expressed his concern regarding the aircraft retreat from the battlefield: “The planes that are grounded are supposed to be America's top-of-the line air superiority plane. This is not like grounding some cargo plane. These are the sinews of our global air dominance,” Boston Globe reports.

Read more: http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/11/air-force-groun.html

---

Also grounding F-15s are Japan and Israel
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2007/11/06/219205/video-israel-and-japan-join-us-in-grounding-f-15s.html

It lessens the chance of WWWIII in the Middle East.

Now their nukes will be their first response.

:nuke:

but how will they deliver them?

They have all of the technology we have. And then some in some areas.

Although the Israelis have some interesting anti-missile missile stuff (and they improved on our patriots rather well) I am not aware of any attack missiles they have, bought, stole or had given to them by us.

Of course, all it takes is a call from Cheney, and that would be solved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-15
The F-15 first flew as a successful prototype in 1972, then became an expensive prop in a bunch of cheesy '80s movies!

seems to me they were used in the waning days of the Vietnam fiasco...

I'm sure the U.S. Air Force will enjoy doing the paperwork on selling the parts for these for many years to come.