F-22 - a plane you won't go to war with?

[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.

The decision to incorporate the Super Hornet and decommission the F-14 is mainly due to high amount of maintenance required to keep the Tomcats operational. On average, an F-14 requires nearly 50 maintenance hours for every flight hour, while the Super Hornet requires five to 10 maintenance hours for every flight hour.

Source : http://www.military.com/features/0,1...l?ESRC=navy.nl