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Comment by jwithington | Hacker News Reader

Trash aircraft. 40-60 hrs of maintenance required for 1 hour of flight. Its successor, the F/A-18, required about 10x less.

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Can the F/A-18 do BARCAP? Engage cruise missile carrying aircraft at range?

The F-14 was an excellent aircraft when using the F-110 engines. The TF-30s were terrible. Cheney just didn't trust NAVAIR to develop any aircraft (see the A-12 fiasco), and he wasn't going to approve updating all the F-14s to the D standard.

We're not going to see soviet bombers dropping nukes before the majority of America is destroyed by the ICBMs.

The F-14 was never tasked with CONUS defense, that was part of the Chair Forces responsibility. The F-14 was designed to prevent missile carrying bombers from attacking the carrier task force.

I don't understand how a plane like that would work in a serious conflict. A week of maintenance after an hour of flight? Anyone depending on those planes in a war wouldn't last very long.

I’m no expert, but 40 hours of maintenance probably isn’t one tech working 9-5 for a week.

Also aircraft are not cars. The front line does day to day wartime service, but the "tasks people take cars to auto mechanics to do" like completely tearing down and re-assembling is done by a totally separate depot level service back in the states. Its like "keeping it running day to day" vs "doing a complete restoration".

Depot service hours only matter in a budgetary sense, although I heard they were immense for the F-14. All those moving wing parts need to be removed, inspected, x-rayed or magnafluxed or whatever they did, reassembled, and exhaustively tested. In comparison, on the flight line day to day, I don't recall hearing the jet required unusually more time than similar aircraft.

Hmm, that's strange, because I keep hearing from several Navy sources that the F14s biggest problem indeed was the time they needed for servicing - the newer Hornets require significantly less time for equal maintenance operations (avionics, engine swaps) and also break less.

The time the F-14s spend sitting inside hangars (and requirements of trained techs to work on them) being useless was the primary driver of their retirement. Carrier hangar space and tech numbers are very limited after all.

I think we're aggressively agreeing with each other.

Using made up numbers, its fine if each F-14 requires twice the maint of a F-18 if a mission pack for a F-14 takes two birds but doing the same mission with F-18 would require at least four.

On the other hand depot level longer term service certainly was a budget buster for the F-14 and if you can pay for depot level service for 100 F18 for the price of 10 F14, well, the fleet's getting F18s.

In a serious conflict, within hours either the carrier will be sunk and so maint will be a moot point, or the opfor will no longer have the capability to sink the carrier (at least by air) and again maint will be a moot point.

Kind of like calculating hours of maintenance per hour of cruise missile flight time, admittedly that metric would apply very well to an observation platform like a E-3, but not so much to a wartime interceptor platform.

Exactly, the F-14 value calculus stems from the carrier's survivability.

Keeping a carrier from being sunk was almost invaluable (at least, to the Navy) in many envisioned conflicts.

Consequently, in a modern, first-strike-is-primary-strike (limited numbers of exquisite, high-lethality weapons and platforms) scenario, ongoing maintainability is less of an issue than maximizing aerial and combat performance.

Reminds me of the UK Type 440 destroyer class, which (I'm going from memory here, if somebody fact checks me I expect them to be right, not me) was designed to fire missiles at incoming USSR aircraft ... with an average time from initial engagement to toast of around 7 minutes.

But if those aircraft were intending to drop nuclear weapons on British soil, even a single successful kill would have saved far more lives than the crew complement of a 440.

I guess multiple technicians work on the aircraft at the same time. Still a lot of man hours.

It's not unheard of for labour cost to be explicitly excluded as a purchasing criterion. The English Electric Lightning was one example: it was intended for defence against Russian bombers with nuclear weapons, and cost of maintenance just didn't matter against any performance improvement which would improve the likelihood of success. The most extreme example was the Mirage IV nuclear bomber, which was said to consume 25% of the French military budget at one time. It wasn't unreliable - apparently it was surprisingly good in that respect - but keeping available was very expensive.

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