I said, "Yes, I told you to smile!" He started laughing and asked if I knew how hard it was to fly not only that close, but at that slow of a speed. He laughed and asked me if I remembered what I asked him to do during the shoot. I told him I was in no hurry and explained that I was the photographer that did the air-to-air shoot with him the year before. He noticed me and finally told a guy who walked up that I had been waiting patiently for a long time and he walked over to me. I was just standing out of the way waiting. He was talking to people about his plane and about the time one would finish, another would walk up. This year at Oshkosh, I got to spend some time talking with Lance. I will put more photos back on this thread later. By CBO’s measure, 40 percent of F-15Cs were available. ” The CBO, however, counted “all aircraft, including those in storage or … depot … as part of the fleet. However, 110 airplanes were “coded as mission capable but could not be flown on combat or training missions, because 17 were undergoing depot-level maintenance and 93 were in storage.”īy the DOD’s counting, in 2019, “67 percent of F-15Cs were available …. In that year, “the Air Force had 304 F-15Cs,” declaring an average of 121 to be mission capable “and possessed by operators,” the CBO said. To illustrate the disparity between how the CBO calculates availability versus the Air Force, it used the Pentagon’s numbers for the F-15C in 2019. “By March 2021, it had recovered to pre-pandemic levels of flying hours.” The CBO speculated that flying less led to a greater availability of spare parts, thus improving the aircraft availability numbers. “In April, 2020, the Air Force flew 69 percent as many hours as it typically did before the pandemic” and was still at only about 82 percent of its pre-pandemic high water mark by February 2021, according to the report. However, USAF saw a precipitous drop in annual flying hours per aircraft. The availability rate “rose from 49 percent in February 2020 to a peak of 54 percent in April 2020, falling to 49 percent in September 2020 and March 2021,” the CBO reported. The Air Force saw a bump in availability of all aircraft due to the COVID-19 pandemic. From just under 300 a year in 2000, trainer flying hours per aircraft got up to about 320 per year by about 2006 and have since declined to about 270. With ups and down of as much as 10 percent over the past 20 years, Air Force trainers are where they were in 2000, at an availability of just over 60 percent. Flying hours per aircraft per year were at 275 in 2000, and after ticking up to 300 by 2010, have declined to about 240 hours per year. Peak availability for the F-15 and F-16 was in 2008.įor rotary and tiltrotor aircraft, USAF saw availability rates at around 60 percent through 2012 followed by a decline to about 55 percent through 2016 and a subsequent recovery to about 58 percent. In flying hours per year over the same period, both were running about 260 in 2000 but had fallen to about 150 for the F-16 and 110 for the F-15 by 2020. The peak of both availability and use was in 2008.įor a more granular look, the CBO examined the F-15C/D and F-16C/D and found that their availability declined from just under 70 percent for both aircraft in 2000 to about 55 percent for the F-16 in 2020, while the F-15 came in about 45 percent. Air Force fighter/attack aircraft flew an average of about 200 hours per year in 2000, gradually declining to about 125 hours per year on average. Over the same period, flying hours for all USAF aircraft declined from an average of about 300 per year to about 230. While the CBO provided only broad graphs and not specific numbers, it showed USAF’s availability for all aircraft as declining from about 60 percent in 2000 to less than 45 percent in 2020, with a similar performance in fighter/attack aircraft (though the F-35 reports differently and was not reflected in the CBO’s charts).
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