Quote:
Originally Posted by GoldenRivet
This is not uncommon, airlines do it too.
It doesnt mean the plane is being "thrown away" its just being placed into storage.
generally, the parts that are prone to deterioration from long term storage - such as the engines - are removed from the aircraft and either "pickled" in lubricants meant to serve as preservatives or they are sent to various air bases to be used for either their parts or to be used when other aircraft are in need of new engines.
The airframe itself will sit in the "bone yard". Bone yard is an unfair term because it makes you think of an airplane grave yard or a place where old airplanes go to die, and while this is partly true, a good many of the planes in the bone yard are just waiting their turn to be needed in one capacity or another.
Places like Roswell, New Mexico, or Kingman, Arizona are used for aircraft bone yards because there is virtually zero humidity in these areas, and machines like airplanes can be left almost completely un-tended for very long periods of time without suffering from the various effects of disuse. these areas are also popular locations for large hangars which house the machinery necessary to repaint airliners in their new paint schemes. I have flown a number of large aircraft to Roswell for both purposes (painting and storage)
So in a way this is not wasteful pork barrel spending... this is frugal.
If a major event required hundreds of aircraft to be reactivated it would simply be a matter of a few days maintenance, some leg stretching flights and sending them to their front line assignments.
Hope this cleared up the mud
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I agree with the storage part and already pointed that out.
However it is very far from frugal to have a pork barrel program that forces the military to take on an aircraft that it has no need for just so you can give 500 people in your state a job.
That is the polar opposite of fiscal conservatism.Yet many politicians of both parties do exactly this some of them claiming to be conservatives and I would not be shocked at all to find some that claim to be fiscal conservatives pork barreling it up.It would be like giving out tickets at a NASCAR race for speeding if you went around and chastised every member of Congress that pork barreled maybe one or two do not in any way and being overly generous to say that.
To say that this was frugal is to completely ignore that the planes should never have been constructed in the first place.
Storing aircraft that where placed into service for an actual need and then storing them in a bone yard when it is useful to do so and to also store aircraft for parts collection and to scrap hulks and sell the materials all of that is fiscally sound and can in many cases be frugal.But when the whole shebang was wasteful unneeded spending in the first place the only gain is in fact to store then in a bone yard where they cost less in comparison to having to maintain them outside of a stowed state and really then it is not so much a gain as a lesser drain.