Tim, as you well know, I think the military is out of control in general when it comes to expenditures.
No more so then the rest of the government, probably less so.
What's the cost of each plane....$50-100 million?
Some where old helicopters. Cost per aircraft includeing all of those that crashed would be from under $5mil to maybe $200mil+ for the B1.
At the current rate of crashes, if the military was one of the airlines, they would be out of busines in a year.
Airlines maximize for safety and efficiency. The military likes both of those too but more effort goes in to performance somewhat reducing the effort left for other considerations. Also the military will push their aircraft a lot harder, going in to difficult places with heavy loads, rapid turnaround, and sudden maneuvers. Air to air refueling is a lot more dangerous then refueling on the ground. The military refuels in the air, civilian planes don't even have the capability to do so.
And don't tell me that the equipment is old.....in fact, its state of the art.
Actually a lot of it is fairly old. The most obvious example is the B-52s whose first prototype flew just over 50 years ago, but ignoring them a lot of the aircraft where initially designed in the 70s and built in the 80s. They have been updated with new electronics and smart bombs as such, but very few of the aircraft in use are really all that new. Its not like most of the aircraft in use are B-2s (we are using a few) F-22s (I don't think they are in active service yet and we only have a handful of them), of F/A-18Es. The F-14 design process started in the 60s.
What types of aircraft crashed? I could name several of them but I don't have an exhaustive list. I could tell you something about how old each aircraft was if I had the list.
Why do you think there are so many crashes?
Military planes have had a higher crash rate then is normal for civilian planes in every large military force for decades, perhaps since the first military plane flew. The military routinely does things with its planes that civilians aircraft either are unable to do or are forbidden to do. Also atleast two of the crashes where helicopters which normally crash more often then planes esp. at altitude. The rate of aircraft going down is actually very low for war time conditions of course a big reason for that is that the AA fire was very ineffective and there where no attempts at air to air intercept. The Taliban's small, ill maintained and mostly obsolete air force was apparently destroyed on the ground early on in the war.
Tim |
