It’s not just a beer:
The U.S. Navy grounded 104 older model F/A-18 fighter jets built by Boeing Co (BA.N). after tests had revealed earlier-than-expected cracks in the airframes, the agency said on Friday.
The Navy’s Naval Air Systems Command cited an emerging “safety of flight issue” with legacy F/A-18 A through D Hornets, after inspections revealed cracking had occurred earlier than predicted on some of the planes.
The grounding affects 104 of the 635 A through D model fighter jets the Navy owns.
Great, that’s 25% of the Navy fleet, or 16% of the total inventory if the Marine Hornets are counted.
We’re pushing hard to “get to” the JSF because the sand charts show us running out of strike fighters if we don’t, and now the underlying assumptions driving that behavior have to be questioned.
Cracks can be fixed, but it’s always expensive and at some point you’ve got to question the value of throwing new dollars at old airframes.
Perhaps perversely, the only folks who stand to profit from this are at Boeing, where the line is still merrily turning out Super Hornets.
And that fancy F-35 has a leg in the same grave that the F-22 went down into, a couple of links here (http://voicefromthenoise.blogspot.com/2010/03/dying-on-vine-part-deux.html) I wonder where that UAV Fighter aircraft is in its development? Might be time for them and at least they won’t be built by Lockheed at double the original cost.
BT: Jimmy T sends.
Lex,
Do you have any idea what the total inventory of Hornets..including Super Hornets…is?
from the public domain: about a thousand A-G, 60 squadrons around the world. Squadrons means fighters, testers, training, USN, USMC, reserves, etc.
sorry…noted now you asked Lex. signed, “not Lex”
Funny how all the talk with the going to be 95% of our future fighter force is whether we need one engines or two, case, you know, something goes wrong with one of the engines.
What happens when the F-35 airframe starts cracking or delaminating earlier than predicted at some point? Red stripe our entire tac-air?
Single point of failure = very bad idea in any endeavour.
First, what Juvat said.
Next, Single vs Twin is something that Nav/Mar is unlearning. An A-7 pilot once told me that the Navy would NEVER again buy a single engine aircraft to put aboard ship; too many frames put in the water because of it.
I remember my second DCAG being an old EA-7 guy (I think there were like two other people in the world who flew that platform) so he had an affinity to a degree for the Prowler squadron in his wing, despite going on to being a hornet jock afterward. He seemed to share a similar attitude about single engines, in general. Then once on a squadron only Fallon det he flew out to meet us and we were having drinks at the officer bar together. He had just come from an F-35 briefing and so we naturally asked him what he thought especially since he was practically the only person anyone knew with single engine carrier ops experience which he consistently relayed as horrible. He instantly stiffened up, got a thousand yard stare, and in a drone robot voice said something like “yes I think the F-35 will be OK.” I’m exaggerating of course, but I think the F-35 breifings for senior commanders must involve some sort of chip implanting session, special concentrated double formula kool-aid, a threat from LM to not say anything bad about it and no one gets hurt, or something . . .
ROFLMAO. Yeah, sumthin li’ that.
Prowler, you should know by now.
If your design is the destruction of the United States as a power, that’s not a bug, it’s a FEATURE!
We saw the same thing in the F-4′s and pre-block 90 F-14, which led to shortened NDI cycles and restricted aircraft maneuvers. You know, with the legacy Hornet, however, we’re not looking at a group of prematurely aging youngsters. Some of those kids have been around the block since the early 80′s, and that’s some serious dog years in the life of a tactical airframe.
As a practical, cost saving matter, all legacy Hornets should have long ago been replaced by the E/F. But, I guess there’s no fixing stupid.
Entropy happens. Each generation of procurement peons makes that discovery…. to be promoted out so the next generation can think they discovered that fact. That’s the cracks. You’d think we’d get smarter about this over time…..
You CAN fix stupid, but it requires losing multiple battles in the first six months of a five-year war.
Maybe they can park them at AMARC, alongside all the P-3′s with wing cracks.
I’d rather buy more E/F’s than fix cracks – either solution is expensive, but at least with a new buy you get a lot more life per buck.
The legacy Hornet was bought as a 6000 hour, 2000 cat/trap, 1.0 FLE airplane. First hurdle–the 1.0 FLE wasn’t really 1.0, it was 0.78. The solution to that was a redesigned center barrel in the lot 18 and above jets and the CBR+ replacement program for the earlier lots (over 120 completed to date). That got the legacy Hornet life back to 1.0 FLE and extended cats/traps t0 2700. Along the way the total airfame hours were extended to 8000. Now the next big hurdle is going beyond 8000 hours–first to 8600 with the high flight hour inspection–and then to 10,000 hours with SLEP.
New versus SLEP/repair all depends on price point. A new Super is about $65M…round it to $60M for some simple math. The Super–just like the legacy Hornet–is another 6000 hour airframe. $60M for 6000 hours equals $10K/hour of airframe life. As long as the HFH/SLEP price for the legacy Hornet is less than $10K/hour, it’s an avenue that people will keep exploring. A $10M SLEP to take a legacy jet to 10K hours is half the price per hour of airframe life. $10M for a life extension from 8K hours to 10K hours of airframe life= $5K/hour of airframe life. There’s still a capability gap, and the harder analysis is to place a dollar value on the capability delta in order to do a true comparison for decision-making purposes.
A good analysis.
Although I think $65M as the flyaway cost for an aircraft, like any flyaway cost, is misleading. If you divide the budget authorized to buy the SH FY after FY by the number of airframes authorized to purchase (to get the unit purchase price I believe) which is truly what it costs to buy and equip an airframe and get it into service, (not counting O&M or RDT&E colors of money, looking strictly at the procurement line items plus previous year advanced procurement and minus current year advanced procurment) you get anywhere from $80M to $100M for the SH, depending on the FY.
You also get about $180M for the F-22, and over $200M for the current batches of initial LRIP JSF.
The one thing we get with E/F new buy is AESA, which legacy Bugs can’t have. That alone, IMO, makes the transition worth the cost.
Absolutely concur.
There are at least two AESA candidates that could be retrofit to the legacy Hornet. Once again it’s all about requirements–and price.
Actually, I saw that at the Northrup Grumman site after posting. It looks like they have a nice AESA (SABR) retrofit working for the F-16, and wonder what it would do for the Hornet.
However, I’m also a firm believer that putting new wine into old bottles isn’t always a good idea. What ELP says below about SLEPing Hornets makes sense. IMO, the legacy Hornet was first gen hybrid metal/composite construction, which was in a time when we were just figuring out what that was.
Too many folks I knew back in the day always complained that working on the frames was a pure b!t@h of an evolution. Simpler in many ways than the Tomcat, but much more complicated in terms of surfaces and structures. Today’s build is light years ahead of the legacy jet, and it makes much more sense to go with improved structural technology in the new build.
I guess that now makes two reasons I’d go with E/F.
Refurbing classic Hornets to 8000hr was a bad idea. A really bad idea is thinking it is worth it to attempt the 10k mark.
It was never designed for routine refurb (for example like an F-15). It is what it was designed to be; a Cold War design that was inexpensive to procure and then thrown into the trash when its airframe life was up. The first rebarrel job was a fluke because someone messed up a fairly new classic. Then too allies. Canada and Australia have determined that after doing a handful of rebarrels, it is too complex and expensive and doesn’t deliver the value.
Get something with a new car smell. Funny how we spend gigadollars on the biggest carriers ever made and then try to shoe-string budget the most important thing on an aircraft carrier; its tactical aircraft.
Statements from Roughead pretty much show he is out to lunch on this whole issue. When is the Navy going to gain back some true air power leaders?
I imagine BGEN Davis’ office lights are burning quite late at HQMC this weekend. Lots of questions and bunches of “what if’s” to be answered. I can imagine that none of the answers are good, nor cheap. As Corsairs_Forever points out, it’s all about the price point. Hardest thing to do will be to avoid, if they go to SLEPing the Bugs, the old “well, while we’re at it” trap of add-ons after add-ons.
RAAF got their first two Rhinos the other day, I hope to see them at the F1 in March.
1400 on Friday they released that message. THANKS GUYS!!!!! So much for going home early.
nice to see some things never change (the 1600 Friday hand grenade for the weekend duty section)!