Why is it so expensive to fly and maintain military aircraft?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

Military aircraft are driven by their ability to do the mission, which doesn’t include profitability and does include some extremely difficult requirements. So they sacrifice efficiency, maintainability, and cost to get the last bleeding edge of performance. Then they get build in (relatively) small numbers so they can’t spread their tooling and spares costs across very many units. And they require very specialized mechanics.

So they’re expensive to design, expensive to build, difficult to maintain (everything takes longer), the people & tools & spares to maintain them are rare (so expensive).

And, to top it off, the military tends to use them waaaaaaaay longer than they were originally designed for, so they eat maintenance like nobody’s business to keep operating.