An aging fleet has Air Force worried

WASHINGTON — At a time the nation is at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force is battling another enemy: age.

The average age of military aircraft during the Vietnam War in 1973 was nine years. Today, the average age is 24 years, and venerable planes such as the KC-135 Stratotanker and the B-52H Stratofortress are well into their 40s, nearly twice as old as some of their pilots.

"These are geriatric airplanes," said Lt. Gen. David Deptula, an F-15 fighter pilot who's now Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Today, more than 800 aircraft — 14 percent of the fleet — are grounded or operating under restricted flying conditions. In turn, overall combat readiness has declined by 17 percent, in part because of "the aging fleet and our ability to get those airplanes in the air," Maj. Gen. Frank Faykes said at a budget briefing in early February.

The age issue has alarmed the Air Force leadership, which is pushing against rising budget pressures to modernize and restock the fleet.

"It was a looming crisis," said Richard Aboulafia, an aircraft analyst with the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va. "And now, because of Iraq and Afghanistan, it's a looming disaster."

Air Force leaders argue that their fleet needs to be modernized with next-generation fighters.

But critics of the costly new aircraft programs argue the Pentagon could save billions of dollars and serve its needs by renovating or modernizing the existing fleet. Air Force officials counter that new state-of-the-art planes are needed to maintain U.S. air superiority against emerging threats, such as the worldwide proliferation of missiles and new fighters being developed by countries such as Russia and China.

A near-disaster

Deptula told a story to illustrate the problem.

In 1979, when he was a young pilot at Kadena Air Base in Japan, he flew a fresh-off-the-assembly-line F-15; the super-hot fighters had entered service only five years before. Twenty years later, he was flying the same jet to enforce a no-fly zone over Iraq, when half the lights in his cockpit flashed on, signaling a serious malfunction.

"I had never seen anything like this," he recalled. After he landed, the maintenance team discovered that wiring insulation had disintegrated after years of decay, causing an electrical short.

"The question is what's going to go wrong next," said the three-star general. "We have never flown fighters this old. If you're driving a 28-year-old car, you can expect some problems. And 28-year-old cars don't go flying around at 700 miles per hour and pull 9 G's."

In 2002, Maj. James Duricy died after he ejected from his F-15 when the aircraft lost part of its tail while flying over the Gulf of Mexico. The Air Force subsequently has replaced vertical stabilizers on nearly half its F-15 fleet after discovering that so-called water intrusion was corroding the internal structure.

Nearly every other legacy aircraft in the fleet shows the wear and tear of years — in most cases, decades — of service. Moreover, the aging process accelerates dramatically for the fighters, tankers, transports and helicopters pressed into action in Iraq or Afghanistan, often because of the stress of combat maneuvers or the sandy, wind-tossed environment of the Middle East.

Fighters past their prime

The F-15, once the world's premier aircraft, is the equivalent of a racehorse past its prime. It was built to fly at Mach 2.3 — nearly 2 1/2 times the speed of sound — but pilots are ordered not to exceed Mach 1.5 on training missions to avoid overtaxing the aircraft.

The F-16 Fighting Falcon also is showing its years. Its manufacturers — first General Dynamics and later Lockheed Martin — sold 2,230 F-16s to the Air Force from 1978 until the service stopped buying the fighter in 2005.

The single-engine fighter was intended to be the lightweight, less expensive companion to the F-15 and was "not designed to have a long life," said Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. But the F-16 fleet has an average age of 17.1 years and has been plagued by age-related engine problems and metal fatigue in its airframe.

Keeping flying clunkers aloft also presents big challenges for maintenance crews. Maintenance costs have increased by 38 percent from 1996 to 2006, said retired Col. Mark Johnson, now the Air Force's deputy director of maintenance. Maintenance man-hours have increased by 50 percent compared with hours of flying time. The workload for heavy repairs at aircraft depots is up by 41 percent.

Old behemoths such as the C-130 and KC-135 are perennial targets of concern. After discovering cracks in the wing boxes of older C-130s, the Air Force grounded those transports that passed 45,000 flying hours and ordered restricted missions for those that have logged at least 37,000 hours.

Tanker replacement

Air Force Chief of Staff T. Michael Moseley has made replacement of the 48-year-old Stratotanker one of his top priorities. Boeing and its European competitor, Airbus, are bidding for a contract that could be worth $100 billion to build a new tanker fleet.

The proposed contract follows earlier scandal-ridden attempts by the Air Force to lease 100 tankers from Boeing for more than $23 billion. The deal unraveled amid allegations that Boeing had improperly recruited Air Force procurement official Darleen Druyun, who was overseeing the lease. Druyun and Boeing's former chief financial officer, Michael Sears, subsequently went to prison.

Moseley, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and other Air Force leaders are spotlighting the aging issue in urging Congress to modernize the fleet. Also a high priority are Lockheed Martin's next-generation fighters, the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II, also known as the joint strike fighter.

Leaders in the Democratic-controlled Congress acknowledge the problems but have indicated that adequately supporting troops in the field will take priority over costly acquisition programs. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, the chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee that oversees tactical aircraft programs, said in a telephone interview that he plans to take a close look at the Air Force's spending request.

"The days of rubber-stamping, the days of winking and nodding and once-over-lightly, are over," he said.