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Originally Posted by goldorak
The F-14 had something like 50 hours of maintenance for each hour of flight. Way way more than even the F-22. You could argue that during the cold war money was no problem, and to a certain extent it was true.
But right now, having an aircarft that requires 30 hours of maintenance for each hour of flight is just absurd. The moreso considering how few of them are operational.
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To be fair, the Super Hornet is in comparison something of an economy plane built on well-grounded tech, while both the F-14 and -22 were more at the limits of technology.
For the record, is it 30 man-hours, 30 hours using the standard sized US maintenance groundcrew or 30 hours if you throw a hundred guys at it?
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The scenarios the F-22 originally has been designed for, currently are to be considered as being very unlikely, and for the more realistic military scenarios of the present and forseeable future, the F-22 has no value, especially no value that justifies it's ridiculous costs
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The problem here, which is ignored by critics in the US and instituniks in Russia, is that militaries aren't designed to face so called "realistic scenarios", by which those critics generally mean "low-intensity conflicts" that aren't vital to the national interest. The military must retain the best possible ability against the worst-case scenario, which is the "high-intensity, high-tech conflicts" that most of those critics dismiss.
However unlikely they are, should the military follow the
instituniks and reorient for LIC, and they suffer badly in the next HIC leading to the loss of vital interests or even sovereignty itself, you can
bet that those instituniks will completely forget their role in all this and blame the generals.