Interesting Air Superiority article

[jmcquate]

Interesting. Any idea why the Eagle is so much higher than the Strike Eagle? Possibly higher average airframe age on the Charlies?

Just a guess. The Guard and Reserve F-15Cs got a lot of hours put on them after 9/11 flying CAP over US cities. Also the Eagle is a Fighter.......that's all it does. ACM/BFM breaks shit. There was also a major safety stand down/ fleet air frame inspection after one broke in two over Virginia.

 

[Pags]

Also an older airframe so might need more TLC, higher spares cost, etc.

 

[Flash]

Flight hour cost per aircraft for a few different models.
http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/04/25/next_time_rd_against_om_109297.html

You'd have to know what type of flight hour cost they're using to start to figure out what's driving the delta.

There is a million different ways to skin that cat, just like figuring out the 'real' cost of a platform. Like Pags already says, I would like to see the math behind how they came up with those numbers and what they took into account.

 

[ryan1234]

Interesting. Any idea why the Eagle is so much higher than the Strike Eagle? Possibly higher average airframe age on the Charlies?

Airframe age is a part of it, but it has to do with a few other things like it was said before. The F-15D is actually one of the more expensive fighters on paper. The "costs" are usually defined by POL with total annual cost divided by number of hours flown that year. Depending on the type of flying (tanker, etc) and the frequency of flying, the CPFH can be manipulated in any direction. If you look at a C model doing .9 to 1.2 sorties and then compare a E model to doing 1.5 to 2.0+ sorties, it can make a larger difference over time. The E models are putting a ton of hours on the jets in theater as well.

 

[Pags]

But what goes in to total annual cost? Gas? Parts? Ranges? People?

USN usually uses AVDLR which includes flight hours (gas) and parts to measure flight hour cost.

But if you're looking at including everything that it takes for the operation to execute your price can go up a lot. For the program I work on I can include contract maint cost, gas, parts, range, telemetry, engineers, etc and drive the cost/fly hr up a lot. If we fly less the cost will go up because a lot of these costs you have to pay regardless of whether you fly or not. For instance we have to pay an annual maintenance that is based more on the amount of people we need then how much we fly. So if we pay $1mil for maintenance for the year and fly 1 hr our flight hr cost is 1mil/hr. If we fly 1mil hrs the flight hour cost is only $1/hr.

This simple example only scratches the surface of to cost out flight hours.

 

[Randy Daytona]

Of course, if they can't get off the ground, then you have no flight hours to pay for....

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/a...iders-fix-for-troubling-block-3i-soft-424650/

“The Air Force attempted two alert launch procedures during the Mountain Home deployment, where multiple F-35A aircraft were preflighted and prepared for a rapid launch, but only one of the six aircraft was able to complete the alert launch sequence and successfully takeoff,” the Pentagon’s top weapons tester disclosed in written testimony to Congress on 26 April. “Problems during startup that required system or aircraft shutdowns and restarts – a symptom of immature systems and software – prevented the other alert launches from being completed.”