… turns out to be $100,000 per hour. Here’s an ABC News story about the U.S. military trailing a potentially hostile Cessna 172 (weighs less than an old VW Beetle) coming in from Canada. The plane was tailed by two F-16 fighter jets for five hours and we evacuated the Wisconsin State Capitol building. The article notes that each F-16 costs $50,000 per hour to operate (remember that this is a single-engine airplane whose acquisition cost is half that of a Gulfstream; let’s not ask what it will cost the USAF to operate the new F-22 fighter jet!).
I’m surprised that the F-16s were able to stay aloft, especially at such a low (fuel-inefficient) altitude, for so long.
The real story here is probably what we can expect as the government takes over ever larger sectors of the economy. Suppose that an average citizen had decided to intercept and follow a Cessna 172. He or she would have hopped in a Mooney or a Bonanza, both substantially faster than the 172, and spent $100 per hour on gas and overhaul reserve. When the government tries to accomplish the same task, it does a more thorough job (2 planes, armed), but it costs 1000 times as much.
The article states that it is $50,000 to “scramble” which may not be directly corelated to the cost of “operating” a civilian aircraft. ie: It may consider controller time & depreciation of equipment, depreciation of runway building costs/takeoff or landing, cost of operating vortacs per flight hour flown by military aircraft, etc. etc. etc. Of course… I am sure those engine overhauls dont come cheap either.
The thing that amuses me about this event and others like it is that the reports always seem to mention that the state capitol/mayor’s office/whatever was successfully evacuated as a precaution.
I don’t know about you, but in my state (IL), other than for human compassion reasons, I could not care less if any government official were a real target. Do I believe that state or local government would cease to function if our governor was killed? Absolutely not. Do I believe that state or local government would cease to function if any representative was killed? Absolutely not. Do I care that power, telephone, food supplies, hospital services and heating gas continue to be available and safe in the event of an attack? Absolutely.
Do politicians really have priority in the emergency protection pecking order?
Do politicians really have priority in the emergency protection pecking order?
Since they are the ones deciding on the pecking order, the answer, unfortunately, is yes.
They didn’t run out of fuel because there were refueled in air.
http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123143280
Phil, don’t these planes fly anyway, whether or not they scramble? I would think these pilots just apply these hours to their training schedule. Keeping a military force has a definite cost. An unidentified aircraft flying in from a foreign country warrants an armed response in my opinion. Kudos to the pilots and the chain of command for not shooting. Someone trying this in Cuba may not be so lucky.
Given they had to dispatch a KC135, it turns out that the price of freedom is even higher. Why didn’t they use a helicopter or use intercept procedures to tell the C172 pilot to land earlier? (For non-pilots, all pilots are required to learn the signals for air intercept procedures for specifically a case like this. The Canadian procedures are virtually identical and a Canadian pilot entering US airspace is responsible to know any US procedures).
PaulS: It is the military official quoted by ABC News who said it cost $50,000 per hour to run each F-16 for an extra hour. I don’t think that it makes sense for us to second-guess the guy, who presumably knows what he pays for engine overhauls, mechanic time, etc.
Would those planes fly anyway? Absolutely not! The military tries to keep hours down as low as possible because so many maintenance and overhaul items are hours-based. What’s the training value of following a Cessna 172 for five hours in a plane capable of supersonic flight? I’m not sure, but I don’t think it is very representative of the mission in Iraq or Afghanistan.
In Vietnam, the U.S. military operated a lot of planes powered by piston and turboprop engines and these were much cheaper to fly. With the gold plating of all government operations, these airplanes were scrapped.
Do you remember Mathias Rust, who flew a Cessna from the Baltic Sea to the Kremlin?
From a historical prospective, had this guy violated U.S. airspace 60 years ago the Civil Air Patrol would have been notified and a Cessna 195 or perhaps a Stinson 108 would have taken to the skies to monitor the situation. But everything is relative. When Harry Truman exited the White House, he and Bess embarked on a long trip to Hawaii followed by a car trip around the U.S. In neither case was there any Secret Service security protection involved.
Google “F-16 costs per hour” returns these results…
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http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA436138
Title : Predicting the Cost per Flying Hour for the F-16 Using Programmatic and Operational Variables
Descriptive Note : Master’s thesis
Corporate Author : AIR FORCE INST OF TECH WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB OH SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT
Personal Author(s) : Hawkins, Eric M.
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and a more informal comment was returned at…
http://comments.realclearpolitics.com/read.php?1,334181,334226,quote=1
. . . At this time the F 16 fleet is about 30 years old. When the fleet was young, the cost to repair an F16 per hour was approx $1500.00. At this time it is around $6K per hour and rapidly increasing due to the age of the airplanes…