As F-35 Comes
Online, Norway to Scrap F-16 Fleet
By: Aaron
Mehta, January 27, 2017
BODØ AIR STATION,
NORWAY – As the Norwegian air force prepares to bring its first three F-35
joint strike fighters to Norwegian soil, the government is taking a simple
approach to disposing of its aging F-16 fleet.
Rather than
trying to deal with the complicated politics of reselling them or paying the
cost of maintaining the older fighters as a reserve, the Ministry of Defense
plans to scrap its collection fifty-plus Fighting Falcons, officials said
during a visit here January 19.
Defense News
visited Norway this month as part of a group organized by the Atlantic Council
and funded by the Norwegian government. All participants accepted travel and
accommodations during the tour.
The
government plans to shut down the 56-plane fleet at the end of 2021, replacing
it with a slightly smaller but more capable fleet of 52 F-35A
conventional-takeoff-and-landing variants. Norway will take possession of six
F-35s in 2017, with three going to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, which is the
US center for training international partners on the Lockheed Martin-designed
plane (Norway already has four F-35s at Luke).
Three others
are expected to arrive in Norway in early November. From 2018 onward, planes
will be delivered directly to Norway, with six new planes arriving each year. Norway
plans for the planes to be declared operational in 2019.
The F-16s
will still be operated through the end of 2021, although the number of flight
hours will drop as the newer jets arrive. Currently the F-16 fleet logs around
7,000 hours per year; that will drop to around 3,000 by 2021, officials here
said. Pilots over the age of 40 have been barred from re-training on the F-35,
in order to make sure the F-16 has a dedicated pilot core until it is fully
retired.
There are a
number of factors at work here that make a resale of the old planes unlikely.
The first is the age of this particular fleet -- Norway’s fleet is among the
oldest of the F-16 groups in the world, with an average plane having over
10,000 hours of flight time.
Another is
the political restrictions on re-selling US defense weapons. As one official
put it, regulations make it easier to “turn them into nails” then try to resell
the jets.
Richard
Aboulafia, an analyst with the Teal Group, says the age of the planes means
they would likely be useful only as training aircraft or for spare parts. More
broadly, he said the market for used F-16s hasn’t been very strong, despite
some potential good fits around the world.
“One issue
has been that many F-16 users have been waiting longer than expected for F-35s,
so the supply of used F-16s has been constrained. But even then US F-16s that
have been available weren’t purchased in significant numbers,” he wrote in an
email. “One problem is that there are relatively few countries that are wealthy
enough to operate F-16s but not wealthy enough to buy them new. But even there, I’m surprised that more
countries in Eastern Europe haven’t opted for used F-16s.”
The planes
won’t be the only thing that is scrapped. The military facilities at Bodø,
which have housed F-16s since they came into service, will no longer be home to
fighter jets. The majority of the F-35 fleet will instead be hosted at Ørland
Main Air Station, with a few kept at the more northern Evenes air base to
protect the P-8 maritime surveillance fleet.
Bodø has a
long history as a military facility, having served as a hub for both the U-2
and SR-71 spy planes operated by the US during the Cold War. (Gary Powers, the
U-2 pilot who was famously shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, was en
route to Bodø when he was captured.) It
has also served as the hub of training for the Norwegian F-16 pilot corps.
Original
post: defensenews.com
The government plans to shut down the 56-plane fleet at the end of 2021, replacing it with a slightly smaller but more capable fleet of 52 F-35A conventional-takeoff-and-landing variants. Norway will take possession of six F-35s in 2017, with three going to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, which is the US center for training international partners on the Lockheed Martin-designed plane (Norway already has four F-35s at Luke).
There are a number of factors at work here that make a resale of the old planes unlikely. The first is the age of this particular fleet -- Norway’s fleet is among the oldest of the F-16 groups in the world, with an average plane having over 10,000 hours of flight time.
Another is the political restrictions on re-selling US defense weapons. As one official put it, regulations make it easier to “turn them into nails” then try to resell the jets.
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