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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (142005)	1/21/2002 11:53:10 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1585485

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. Tim, I question the less so; besides two wrongs don't make it right. 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. Remember this was outside Afghanistan......I believe it was two F 15s or F 16s that went down. 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. I understand the loss of aircraft when at war from difficult flying conditions etc.......however, I have a problem when the planes that crash occur during peacetime patroling or maneuvers. 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. Again I was talking F 15s and F 16s. ted