I just so some numbers like 20-35K dollars per flight hour for some fighters and that seems ridiculous, anyone know what costs so much?
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Aircraft by the nature are expensive, and jet aircraft are very expensive. Ultra high performance aircraft are EXTREMELY expensive.
Here’s the typical cost to operate a Gulfstream 550 Exec Jet – ~$9000/flying hour
[https://www.aircraftcostcalculator.com/AircraftOperatingCosts/187/Gulfstream+G550](https://www.aircraftcostcalculator.com/AircraftOperatingCosts/187/Gulfstream+G550)
And if you think that fuel cost is off, at $6.00/gal, it’s not:
[https://www.globalair.com/airport/region.aspx](https://www.globalair.com/airport/region.aspx)
The national average for JetA is $6.30. 100LL (AvGas) is $6.70! And you thought Super Unleaded was bad.
A G550 only has two engines burning that $6/gal stuff too. A B52 has eight! And miljets burn so much of it, they don’t measure it in gallons, they measure it in pounds (or thousands of pounds in the big birds). Afterburners burn gallons per *second* in really powerful jet engines.
Others have mentioned maintenance costs. For example, the F-22 Raptor has published maintenance requirement of 40hours per flight hour. This includes everything from filling the plane with JetA, to checking the air in the tires, to washing the canopy of dead bugs, to making sure the engines are running right and the flight controls and computers are doing what they are supposed to. So if a typical F-22 flies just 200 hours a year for training (no idea if this is fair or not), that single aircraft will get 8000 hours of standard maintenance. Thats 4 person-years of salary, just to keep that plane in flyable shape.
A quick google search says an E-3 makes $28K a year. If all the hours are E-3 hours, that’s over $100K for that aircraft’s basic maintenance. Between that and the 200-250 gallon per hour fuel burn *at cruise*, it all adds up!
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