By Michael Sirak
FORWARD OPERATING BASE, Southwest Asia–The current grounding of the Air Force’s fleet of F-15 fighter jets shows the challenges and dangers of operating an aging inventory, the top Air Force general in the Middle East/Near East region said here last week.
“I think the key piece that most America does not understand is our Air Force–the core of our business, when you talk about flying airplanes–is very old,” Lt. Gen. Gary North, commander of Central Air Forces (CENTAF), said during a meeting with reporters on Nov. 8.
The general manages the coalition air campaigns in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility (AOR), which includes Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa.
“While we pay particular attention to the wear and tear on our Army and Marine systems, I think our population needs to understand we have worn our airplanes out,” North said. “Some of our airplanes–and I have said this before and am on the record with it–are on their way to extinction.”
Take, for example, the KC-135 tanker aircraft fleet, which just celebrated its 51st aniversary, the general said. Although the Air Force’s top priority is to replace them with a new KC-X aerial refueling platform, the rate of the new tankers entering the fleet, projected at around 15 per year, will mean that some KC-135R aircraft remain in service for decades to come.
“We are projected to fly [KC-135] tankers for such a period of time that the equivalent rate would be we’d be fighting today’s war flying B-17s,” North said, referencing the famous World War II bomber aircraft.
The C-130 transport aircraft is nearly as old, North said.
“A C-130E not two and a half months ago flying in here over Baghdad had a congressional delegation on it, and the airplane was over 44 years old,” he said. “The only people older than the airplane was the congressional delegation because all of the aircrew members were very junior to that.”
Not only is the age of the Air Force’s aircraft alarming, but also their high rate of usage, North said.
“I am flying airplanes in the AOR at an incredible rate,” he said. “If I kept an F-16 fighter here and flew it at the rate for one year that I fly it in a normal rotation, that airplane would age 5.5 times what we have programmed for peacetime flying.”
Higher than normal rates apply similarly for the Air Force’s bombers, tankers and transport aircraft in the theater, North said.
“We are flying them between 2.2 and 2.8 times the programmed peacetime rate,” he said. “What does that really mean? It means that we are flying the wingtips and the tails off of the airplanes.”
Ignoring the issue will have serious implications for the nation, North said.
“In the future, if we do not study this wisely and get funded appropriately for the airplanes that the chief [of staff] is asking for for our Air Force for recapitalization, we will find ourselves in a bathtub that we may not be able to work our way out of,” he said. “And then America’s Air Force will have a large problem because we may not be able to respond to the requirements the nation puts on us. Pretty straightforward.”
North is not the first senior Air Force official to warn recently of the alarming state of the service’s inventory (Defense Daily, Sept. 21 and Oct. 26, 2007 and June 15, 2006). But the F-15 grounding has brought to light the issue.
The Air Force grounded its worldwide fleet of about 700 F-15s after the preliminary findings of the Nov. 2 crash of a Missouri Air National Guard F-15C in the United States pointed to a potential structural issue. The F-15 entered service in 1975.
A thorough investigation is underway, but in the interim, even the F-15E Strike Eagles used by North to support combat operations in U.S. Central Command’s AOR from Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, are only available to fly as a last resort.
“There are some key points here,” North said of the F-15 situation. “One, the airplane is very old, In fact, that airplane that crashed had, I think, about 5,700 hours on it. I am flying F-15s that have been in combat since 1991 and have more hours on them than that airplane which crashed.”
The Air Force is buying Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets to replace F-15s, but is only authorized to buy 183 of the 381 it says it needs so that the United States maintains air supremacy in future conflict. Already about 100 Raptors are in the inventory.
Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne last month stated before Congress his desire for the service to be appropriated funding in FY ’09 to pay for materials and long-lead- time items for 20 additional F-22s beyond the 183 already on order (Defense Daily, Oct. 29). Some lawmakers have come out already in support of this (Defense Daily, Nov. 8).
But even with the advent of the F-22s, the Air Force’s current plans–pending the findings of the accident investigation board–are to maintain the F-15Es to the mid 2030s and about 177 F-15C/Ds for approximately two more decades.