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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

> A recent RAND study found the cost of training a basic qualified fighter pilot ranges from $5.6 million for an F-16 pilot to $10.9 million for an F-22 pilot.

Those numbers seem outrageous to me. Why does it cost so much? Are there frequent plane crashes?

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Cost of flying F-22 for an hour is reported anywhere between $33k and $70k, with most estimates in the $60k range. Let's assume $50k/hour to be safe - 200 hours of flight time gets you to the $10 million figure on its own, with no other costs accounted for.

Pilot still ends up the cheap part of the equation, given ~$200mil+ per airplane cost.

Whee - are we having budgetary fun yet :-)

I hadn't thought about the cost of flight time. That makes sense.

To put what you said in another way, every hour an F-22 flys costs the same as hiring someone at a middle class wage for a year.

My guess is that a substantial part of those costs are probably to pay a few people a middle class wage.

"A few", as in 2500? That's roughly the number of working days in a year multiplied by the number of working hours in a military day. What are all those people doing, and is there a distinct set of people doing those things for every aircraft? There must be some other explanation...

Remember that our strategy against the soviets was to bankrupt them through military buildup in their massively corrupt and inefficient economic system. Back then, we could build things a lot cheaper than them, so we built a lot of stuff we didn’t need because they would have to try to keep up.

This wasn't so much a strategy as a backward explanation for why we were spending so much. They couldn't say the real reason, corruption. Now spending so much has been just as normalized as a "standing" army. No one still alive remembers what peacetime used to mean. So, they don't have to lie any more about "strategies" for the Soviets.

How much do you think it costs to fill up an F-15 with Jet Fuel?

Not to mention the maintenance requirements on the planes (and the ground crews to do it) and the cost of ammunition used in training (missles aren't cheap)

It’s insane the wastage that goes into the army, and the environmental destruction.

Think about the logistics of getting a class of pilots from the training sites, simulators, classrooms, housing, etc. Not to mention the costs to keep all those places open. Pilots have 100s or more of hours in simulators before they even touch a plane. Now add the costs of training in the actual plane and related training missions bombs, fake targets, bombing ranges etc...

One important detail is that not all pilots are going to be fighter pilots (which usually means less expensive trainings).

C17s, KC-135s, A10s, C-130s make up a significant part of the USAF fleet, not to mention the smaller transport/utility craft

Just a single sortie is very expensive in just maintenance + supply. You need a whole crew to prepare a plane. Not to speak of the whole infrastructure required to train pilots, having places to fly from, teachers to learn from. It all adds up to a huge number, that when you divide by the number of pilots trained, doesn't get reduced by a lot.

I'm guessing it has to do with flight time. Flying a jet is expensive. A jet will consume something like $10,000 of fuel per hour of flight time. Not to mention maintenance costs, the costs of the maintenance crew, the cost of having dedicated f-16s and f-22s for training is probably included in there as well. Not to mention what is probably a high dropout rate. All that adds up. $5.6M still sounds high to me, but I imagine there are a bunch of other costs I'm not thinking about.

A lot of it is allocation of fixed costs. It costs a fortune to operate training programs. Lots of buildings, runways, infrastructure, staff, maintenance, security, etc. So they take that annual cost and divide by the number of pilots trained every year.

Per Wikipedia a B2 bomber has an hourly operational cost of $135,000.

No idea how many hours you have to train on the thing in real life to become proficient; but at that rate...yeesh!

"Per Wikipedia a B2 bomber has an hourly operational cost of $135,000."

I was thinking about this number when the B-2 flew over the Rose Bowl this year :-)

There was a flight for 44.3 hours, then without even stopping the engines another one of 30 hours. That makes for a $10,030,500 flight not even counting the bombs.

https://www.uso.org/stories/253-inside-the-longest-bombing-r...

- Years of training on multiple platforms (initial pilot training, follow up training on the platform itself, possibly others)

- Maintenance and logistics of those platforms

- Probably amortizing the cost of those planes across each pilot using it for training

The cost of the people to support all of that, too.

It seems as expected to me. These planes cost tens of thousands per flight hour plus a huge support staff is needed. I don’t think they even fly that much.

Jets cost a ton to operate, in fuel, maintenance and personnel.

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