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Think of the Economic Windfall!!!!!

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The F-22 was supposed to free us from the costs of maintaining on aging, expensive fleet of F-15s. Turns out that this may have been a touch optimistic, and that F-22 maintenance may be an economic stimulus program unto itself:

While most aircraft fleets become easier and less costly to repair as they mature, key maintenance trends for the F-22 have been negative in recent years, and on average from October last year to this May, just 55 percent of the deployed F-22 fleet has been available to fulfill missions guarding U.S. airspace, the Defense Department acknowledged this week.

Sensitive information about troubles with the nation’s foremost air-defense fighter is emerging in the midst of a fight between the Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress over whether the program should be halted next year at 187 planes, far short of what the Air Force and the F-22’s contractors around the country had anticipated.

“It is a disgrace that you can fly a plane [an average of] only 1.7 hours before it gets a critical failure” that jeopardizes success of the aircraft’s mission, said a Defense Department critic of the plane who is not authorized to speak on the record. Other skeptics inside the Pentagon note that the planes, designed 30 years ago to combat a Cold War adversary, have cost an average of $350 million apiece and say they are not a priority in the age of small wars and terrorist threats.

Its troubles have been detailed in dozens of Government Accountability Office reports and Pentagon audits. But Pierre Sprey, a key designer in the 1970s and 1980s of the F-16 and A-10 warplanes, said that from the beginning, the Air Force designed it to be “too big to fail, that is, to be cancellation-proof.” Lockheed farmed out more than 1,000 subcontracts to vendors in more than 40 states, and Sprey — now a prominent critic of the plane — said that by the time skeptics “could point out the failed tests, the combat flaws, and the exploding costs, most congressmen were already defending their subcontractors’ ” revenues.

“We knew that the F-22 was going to cost more than the Air Force thought it was going to cost and we budgeted the lower number, and I was there,” [Former Pentagon Comptroller John] Hamre told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April. “I’m not proud of it,” Hamre added in a recent interview.

Skin problems — often requiring re-gluing small surfaces that can take more than a day to dry — helped force more frequent and time-consuming repairs, according to the confidential data drawn from tests conducted by the Pentagon’s independent Office of Operational Test and Evaluation between 2004 and 2008.

Over the four-year period, the F-22’s average maintenance time per hour of flight grew from 20 hours to 34, with skin repairs accounting for more than half of that time — and more than half the hourly flying costs — last year, according to the test and evaluation office. The Air Force says the F-22 cost $44,259 per flying hour in 2008; the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the figure was $49,808. The F-15, the F-22’s predecessor, has a fleet average cost of $30,818.

Long excerpt, but read the rest. The fact that we can read it at all means that Gates and Obama are serious about killing the F-22, and are instructing people to leak on its shortcomings. I suspect that we’ll get more stories like this as decision time gets closer. I also think that this demonstrates that administration veto threats aren’t hollow; they really seem serious about killing this plane.

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