"Are "they" replacing all those jets that crash?" Topic

Last week the Thunderbirds and Nlur Sngels each lost S jet fighter.
Yesterday, 2 F16s were lost in training.

Are the production lines shut down for these planes? Is what we have all we are going to have?
Are any Important People worried about this?

Yes.
Yes.
No.

SP is spot on.

1. Yes, the production line is shutting down. The USAF got all that it ordered. Foreign orders are stalled due to real world concerns about the ability of the customer to pay and the use of the aircraft. Sometimes the enemy of my friend is also my friend. The aircraft industry cannot keep a production line open on the speculation that an order may be coming in. The US government cannot just keep buying aircraft on the speculation that it use or sell them. There is a country in the world that keeps cranking out M1 tanks and parking them in the desert. The free market does not work that way.

2. The vacancies on the operational units will be replaced. There are F16s that were purchased as replacements and there are F16s that were not upgraded. The ones that crashed will be replaced. It may take time for those replacement airframes to be de-processed and upgraded to the required configuration.

3. Important people are worred about this. There is competition for scarce financial and human resources just within the USAF let alone between the Services and among other US government requirements. The USAF is committed to the F35 is trying to keep everything going until the F35 comes on line (hopefully) or is cancelled (possible). There is also strong competition from unmanned platforms. Their increased capability and decreasing cost may allow then to take on most missions currently done by fighter aircraft. Maybe even air shows at some point.

The US armed forces have a colossal reserve fleet of aircraft in mothballs that is probably bigger than the rest of the world's air forces put together!

The aircraft are classified based on their utility:
Spare aircraft
spare parts
waiting disposal
Spare aircraft are capable of being activated. The others aren't.

I have a very good idea of what it takes to get a mothballed aircraft back into service. The RAF has a unit at RAF Shawbury that does exactly that and a fellow Cranwell graduate mate of mine runs it. He also does a great deal of work with the USAF and the (massive) unit that does the same job in the States.

I think you get the picture.

The Thunderbirds fly a relatively new F-16 Block F with a relatively new engine and there should be an available airframe but the poor Blues are flying the baseline F/A-18 A-D models, not the Super Hornet and while they will surely scrape up another airframe, it will be old and from what the defense press has been reporting, maintenance is an issue.

Note that the Blues also do not fly with a G-Suit because it allegedly interferes with centering the stick on the F/A-18.(no idea what that means)

I do not know why we keep on building a completely new airplane; F22, F35, when all you need to do is build more F16's or F18's.

Would be far cheaper since all of the initial work (R&D) has been done.