Air Force pilots flying on aging wings
WASHINGTON – At a time when the nation is at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force is also battling another enemy – age.
The average age of military aircraft during the Vietnam War in 1973 was nine years. Today the average age is 24 years, and venerable planes such as the KC-135 Stratotanker and the B-52H Stratofortress are well into their 40s, nearly twice as old as some of their pilots.
“These are geriatric airplanes,” said Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, an F-15 fighter pilot who’s now Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Today, more than 800 aircraft – 14 percent of the fleet – are grounded or operating under restricted flying conditions. In turn, overall combat readiness has declined 17 percent, in part because of “the aging fleet and our ability to get those airplanes in the air,” Maj. Gen. Frank Faykes said at a budget briefing in early February.
The age issue has alarmed Air Force leadership, which is pushing against rising budget pressures to modernize and restock the fleet.
“It was a looming crisis,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aircraft analyst with the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va. “And now, because of Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s a looming disaster.”
Air Force leaders argue the fleet needs to be modernized with next-generation fighters.
But critics of the costly new aircraft programs counter that the Pentagon could save billions of dollars and still serve its needs by renovating or modernizing the existing fleet. Air Force officials counter that new state-of-the-art planes are needed to maintain U.S. air superiority against emerging threats, such as the worldwide proliferation of missiles and new fighters being developed by countries such as Russia and China.
Deptula recited a personal vignette to illustrate the problem.
In 1979, when he was a young pilot at Kadena Air Base in Japan, he flew a fresh-off-the-assembly-line F-15 just as the super-hot fighters were entering service. Twenty years later, he was flying the same jet to enforce a no-fly zone over Iraq when half the lights in his cockpit suddenly flashed on, signaling a serious malfunction.
“I had never seen anything like this,” he recalled. After he landed, the maintenance team discovered that wiring insulation had disintegrated after years of decay, causing an electrical short.
“The question is what’s going to go wrong next,” said the three-star general. “We have never flown fighters this old. If you’re driving a 28-year-old car, you can expect some problems. And 28-year-old cars don’t go flying around at 700 miles per hour and pull 9 G’s.”
There’s an epilogue to Deptula’s story. His son followed him into the Air Force and is now flying the same vintage F-15s his father piloted.
With the Air Force now reaching its 60th anniversary, anecdotes such as Deptula’s echo throughout the service, sometimes with tragic endings.
In 2002, Maj. James Duricy died after he ejected from his F-15 when the aircraft lost part of its tail while flying over the Gulf of Mexico from Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. The Air Force subsequently has replaced vertical stabilizers on nearly half its F-15 fleet after discovering that so-called water intrusion was causing the internal structure to corrode.
Nearly every other legacy aircraft in the fleet shows the wear and tear of years – in most cases, decades – of service. Moreover, the aging process accelerates dramatically for the fighters, tankers, transports and helicopters pressed into action in Iraq or Afghanistan, often because of the stress of combat maneuvers or the sandy, wind-tossed environment of the Middle East.
The F-15, once the world’s premier aircraft, is the equivalent of a racehorse past its prime. It was built to fly at Mach 2.3 – nearly two and half times the speed of sound – but pilots are now ordered not to exceed Mach 1.5 on training missions to avoid overtaxing the aircraft.
The F-16 Fighting Falcon also is showing its years. Its manufacturers – first General Dynamics and later Lockheed Martin – sold 2,230 F-16s to the Air Force from 1978 until the service stopped buying the fighter in 2005.
The single-engine fighter was intended to be the lightweight, less expensive companion to the F-15 and was “not designed to have a long life,” said Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. But the F-16 fleet now has an average age of 17.1 years and has been plagued by age-related engine problems and metal fatigue in its airframe.
Keeping flying clunkers aloft also presents big challenges for maintenance crews. Maintenance costs have increased by 38 percent from 1996 to 2006, said retired Col. Mark Johnson, now the Air Force’s deputy director of maintenance. Maintenance man-hours have increased by 50 percent, compared with hours of flying time. The workload for heavy repairs at aircraft depots is up by 41 percent.
After more than a century of flight, what to do about the problems of elderly aircraft – both military and commercial – increasingly has become a focal point of aviation. In Wichita, Kan., the Aging Aircraft Research Laboratory has been in operation since 2002 as part of the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University.
The dangers of flying aircraft past their prime gained national attention when a large section of the fuselage sheared away from a 19-year-old Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 while it was in flight in 1988, apparently because of metal fatigue.
Dale Cope, the lab director at Wichita, said the two most prevalent effects of aging are corrosion and metal fatigue, caused by hour after hour of changing air pressure on the aircraft structure.
Metal fatigue typically displays itself as tiny, often microscopic, cracks that spread and weaken the material. Cope likened it to twisting a paper clip until it breaks. His lab examined the wing skin on a retired C-130 transport and found evidence of about 450 cracks, Cope said.
Old aerial behemoths such as the C-130 and KC-135 are perennial targets of concern. The 92nd Air Refueling Wing at Spokane’s Fairchild Air Force Base flies KC-135 aircraft.
After discovering cracks in the wing boxes of older C-130s, the Air Force grounded those transports that passed 45,000 flying hours and ordered restricted missions for those that have logged at least 37,000 hours.
Air Force Chief of Staff T. Michael Moseley has made replacement of the 48-year-old Stratotanker one of his top priorities. The Boeing Co. and its European competitor, Airbus, are bidding for a contract that ultimately could be worth $100 billion to build a new tanker fleet.
The proposed contract follows earlier scandal-ridden attempts by the Air Force to lease 100 tankers from Boeing for more than $23 billion. The deal unraveled amid allegations that Boeing had improperly recruited the Air Force procurement official, Darleen Druyun, who was overseeing the lease. Druyun and Boeing’s former chief financial officer, Michael Sears, were subsequently sent to prison.
Moseley, Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne and other Air Force leaders are spotlighting the aging issue in urging Congress to modernize the fleet. Also high on the priority list are Lockheed Martin’s next-generation fighters, the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II, also known as the joint strike fighter.
Leaders in the Democratic-controlled Congress acknowledge the problems but have indicated that adequately supporting troops in the field will take priority over costly acquisition programs. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, the chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee that oversees tactical aircraft programs, said in a telephone interview that he plans to take a hard look at the Air Force’s spending request.
“The days of rubber-stamping, the days of winking and nodding, and once-over-lightly are over,” he said.