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Hangar Queens! The U.S. Air Force’s Old F-15s Keep Flying While Newer F-22s Sit Idle
David Axe
Air Force Magazine has obtained the U.S. Air Force’s mission-capable rates for 2019. They tell a familiar story. Older planes generally are more reliable than newer ones are. More importantly, simpler planes fly much more often than more-complex ones do.
That could be a problem for the Air Force as it tries to retire old, simple planes and replace them with new, complicated ones. The service is making it harder and harder for itself to generate sorties.
The Air Force in 2020 possesses 5,500 aircraft—5,182 manned planes and 318 drones. On average, slightly over 70 percent of those planes could fly on any given day in 2019. That’s the same rate as in 2018. In 2012 the overall readiness rate was 77 percent.
Readiness in 2019 varied greatly by type. Take fighters, for instance.
The average age of the Air Force’s 212 F-15Cs is 36 years. But they are half again as ready as are the 185 F-22s, which are 13 years old, on average.
The younger F-35—roughly 200 planes with an average age of just three years—manages to fly 10-percent more often than the F-22 does but still falls short of the F-15 and the F-16. The 940-strong F-16 fleet manages a mission-capable rate greater than 70 percent with planes averaging 30 years of age.
The F-22 and F-35 with their stealth qualities of course are much more complex than the non-stealthy F-15 and F-16 are.
The same dynamic is at play in the bomber fleet. Older, simpler bombers are the readiest.
Consider, the 62 B-1s are 33 years old, on average. The 20 B-2s are 26 years old, on average. The 76 B-52s on average are 59 years old, but by far turned in the best readiness rate.
It’s worth noting that the Air Force plans to retire the B-1s and B-2s in the 2030s, replacing them with new B-21s. But the B-52s with new engines and electronics could continue flying into the 2050s. Count on the ancient bombers to continue turning in impressive mission-capable rates.
The story is consistent across plane types. Check out the numbers for tankers.
The 398 KC-135s average 60 years of age but exceed the Air Force’s fleet-wide readiness rate. The Air Force has targeted the 59-plane KC-10 fleet for cuts. But those 36-year-old tankers boast one of the best readiness rates of any of the service’s planes.
The roughly 50 brand-new KC-46s, each plane still smelling of Boeing BA’s Washington State factory, are far less reliable than are tankers that first flew when John F. Kennedy was president.
The impressive readiness of older planes compared to newer ones is a strong argument for keeping those planes in service as long as possible. An F-15 might not be stealthy like an F-22 is, but you can count on an F-15 being ready to fly and fight when an F-22 is stuck in its hangar awaiting maintenance.
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