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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Parts are of course expensive. Lower tolerances mean higher prices, and also lower volumes mean higher prices. Military aircraft tend to suffer from both of those issues simultaneously, being relatively rare and requiring very high precision in their equipment.
However another major issue is maintenance time. You can’t just fly a jet around all day and then pack it away into a hangar ready for work the next day. For example the F-22 requires around 30 hours of maintenance for every hour it is flown. The F-22 has a flight endurance of around 8 hours (so they say) which means that after such a flight it would need 240 hours of maintenance!
Overall though those figures are typically for the total cost of ownership of the fighter which considers *everything* that goes into operating the aircraft. Need a special hangar to store those aircraft? That gets divided up into their flight hours. Need a special set of tools in that hangar to work on the aircraft? Parts? Training and paying a maintenance crew to actually use them? Training the pilots? Fuel?
All that cost is divided by the hours the aircraft actually flies to determine the cost per flight hour.
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