Operational Aircraft

According to a recent cnn.com article, the US Air Force "needs" $100 Billion over the next 5 years to buy a fleet of F-22's and F-35's...and some other panes too. It's no surprise that the AF wants these jets (who wouldn't right?) Now granted, with F-15's literally falling apart, it makes sense that the Air Force needs something new. If the US got into a fight against a country with a reasonably modern air force it'd want every edge it can get, but it also needs to be able to keep up its current fight.

Aviation Week and Defense News, are buzzing this week about a suggestion made by Boeing to buy F-18 E/F Super Hornets instead of Lockheed F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, and fly the Hornets while waiting for something better than the JSF.

It could be argued that this is just Boeing trying to steal business from their biggest rival in the lucrative fighter market: Lockheed. Although the Super Hornet lacks some of the stealth and proposed systems of the F-35, it has several strong points:

When most people think of warbirds, planes such as the P-51, B-17, F-86 and F-4 come to mind. The newly reformed Iraqi Air Force doesn't have access to anything on that scale yet. Instead, they've started using aircraft such as the Cessna C-172S and C-208 as well as the Zenair CH2000 Alarus we recently mentioned in an article of our own.

We recently reported that the F-15 fleet was ungrounded. Now according to the Air Force, Air Combat Command has grounded the F-15 A-D models and is encouraging other commands to do the same. The Accident Investigation Board has found new evidence showing that there may be structural issues with the longerons along the pilot's canopy.

The aircraft initially performed a general inspection on the longerons. Once the longerons went through a metallurgical analysis, they refined the inspection technique for inspecting the longerons. We will keep you up to date as more information becomes available.