Grounded: Why Down Time is Up
Among the GAO’s findings, as reported by
TheDrive.com’s “The War Zone” blog.
The F-22’s low-observable coatings require frequent, intense maintenance.
To preserve those coatings, the jet must be housed in climate-controlled hangars.
Spare parts for the out-of-production aircraft are exorbitant and dif icult to come by. It’s not uncommon for maintenance crews to cannibalize parts from other F-22s that are not operational.
The numbers game and the way the jets are being deployed means F-22 pilots receive only a fraction of the flight hours they need to adequately hone their air superiority skills.
Michael’s fi erce winds peeled back
the corrugated roofs of hangars at the base. As offi cials took to helicopters to survey the damage — the roads below were impassable — it gradually emerged that some of the base’s pre- cious F-22s had been left behind in hangars to face the storm’s fury.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio revealed
no way to get them out of the storm’s path.
The key point that went largely unnoticed: Seventeen of the base’s 55 aircraft, valued at well over $5 billion, were unable to take fl ight. That failing spotlighted a major
issue regarding the nation’s reliance on the F-22 to preserve U.S. air supe- riority against near-peer competitors China and Russia, who seem to grow more emboldened on the global stage with each passing day. A review of the Air Force’s own maintenance statistics indicates the only surprise at Tyndall was that the ratio of inoperative to combat-ready F-22s wasn’t higher. Tyndall’s ability to get its jets in the
air was actually better than the Air Force average — and given the central importance of air superiority in U.S. warfi ghting doctrine, that’s a serious problem. Fighter mainstays like the F-15 and
F-16 are operational about 70 percent of the time. The sophisticated B-1B and B-2A
bombers had a much lower degree of readiness, at 53 and 54 percent, respectively. And the aircraft with the lowest mission-capable rate? That would be the F-22, at 49 percent.
that 31 percent of the base’s F-22s — and Pentagon reform expert at the the that is, 17 of the 55 — had remained behind in Tyndall’s now-tattered han- gars, where they were exposed to salt- water and fl ying debris.
Dan Grazier, a national security entagon eform
ert
Project On Government Oversight (POGO), tells Newsmax, “The F-22 generally has a less than 50 percent
Air Force offi cials explained they simply had no choice: With only a few days’ notice before landfall, there was
A High-Tech Marvel O
availability rate. In July, the Government Account-
ability Offi ce issued a report blaming the Air Force for assigning the F-22s to too many routine patrols, alerts, and deployments. The report suggested the Air Force
was using the elite fi ghter for too many pedestrian tasks, thereby reducing its availability for its No. 1 high-end mis- sion — sweeping other nation’s fi ghter jets out of the sky. Deployment issues and squadron
size can certainly be addressed. But the F-22’s bigger issue, beyond her high-maintenance reputation, is the size of the F-22 fl eet. With just 186 jets in inventory —
one jet crashed and burned at Tyndall in November 2012 due to a frayed wire that triggered a fi re — there isn’t much margin for error in how the aircraft are deployed and maintained. According to TheNatonalInterest.
com, only 123 of the 186 F-22 jets are “combat-coded,” that is, designated for actual warfi ghting. The rest are used for training, testing, evaluation, and backup aircraft inventory. With a mission-capable rate of 49 percent, that could mean only 60 to 80 F-22s would be available at any given point in time to defend the country domestically, as well as to protect U.S. allies and assets abroad.
nce the F-22 is in the air, it lives up to its reputation as a high-tech marvel. When radar is pinging it from a head-on aspect, it’s almost undetectable.
And its kill ratio in competitions against top fourth-generation fighters exceeds 100 to 1. Dave Majumdar, defense editor for The National Interest, calls the F-22 “far and away the best air superiority fighter ever built.”
JANUARY 2019 | NEWSMAX 21
F-22/ ROB SHENK (
HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PEOPLE/50115004@N00) FROM GREAT FALLS, VA, USA
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