Retired?

[fbhjr]

The stealth fighter is being retired?
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/11/stealth.fighter.ap/index.html

Who saw that coming?

Comments

[oakenguy.livejournal.com]

Riiiight...it just wants to make us think it's retired. Well played, stealth fighter. Well played.

[yebo.livejournal.com]

Nobody could, 'cause even the retirement is stealthy....

[palusbuteo.livejournal.com]

"Who saw that coming?"

it apparently slipped under your radar :D

I had read about this somewhere...I forget now.

Apparently the Maintence hours and ease were atrocious; apparently nearly as bad as an F-14D; and getting parts apparently was tricky too, as materials had been sequestered for other projects like F-22 and F-35....Which have been chalked up as being able to do it Faster Harder More Intense.

Same difference with the SR-71 - Satelites became cheaper/more available, and couldn't really be tracked at all...The SR-71 just flew so damn fast nothing would catch it anyway, but it's operating costs was probably 3x the budget of a small nation.

It's kind of sad, but I also still can't believe it's nearly 30 years old....But, I would not be surprised that if any of the F-22's goes down, or doesn't somehow live up to it's hoity toity self, the Big Brass will start looking for a replacement soon enough ~ Which is what I think happened to the F-117 when a few of them crashed/had computer problems/were not as "stealth" as it was chalked up to be. I think you and I have even talked about that a fews times, [We] focused our development on stealth airframes to counteract [Soviet] SAM systems that had a dozen tracking systems, where we only had 3-4 countermeasures....Sure, you can have a Fighter that has the profile of a sparrow, but a sparrow zooming along your radar scope at [400] knots is a bit suspicious.

And at the same time, I find the cost of the F-22 ironically sky high compared to maintaining current fleet of otherwse battle-proven airframes that are still pretty darn potent.

[evrgreen.livejournal.com]

I was also surprised to see this, but I guess that it makes sense - from what I understand, many of the parts were very hard to manufacture, and much of the airframe was GLUED together. While very high-tech for a first attempt, it was a severe maintenance challenge and now that they've managed to improve upon the basic ideas with the newer planes, the cost of maintaining this bird was out of proportion with the size of "fleet".

Many old planes still come out of retirement. I play in a band with a retired air force colonel who used to fly B-52s. The B-52 was as high tech for its day as the F-117 - perhaps more so - and still they have been used in many operations for the past ~ 50 years.