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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To be fair, it probably costs a substantial amount to fly and maintain any aircraft, but armed forces do not make a profit.
The are very high performance aircraft. They require a lot of specialized maintenance. Kind of like a race car compared to a regular car.
Full id expensive, parts are expensive, the jets have to do tough things that break them down faster, and you have to train tons of specialist to work dozens of hours to keep the plane going
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.
Cost per flight hour is generally just calculated as the total cost of ownership for thay year divided by the number of flight hours in that year.
There are a LOT of costs associated with military craft given the personnel and facilities associated with supporting them.
They also don’t tend to fly much per year compared to say, a commercial jet liner.
The result is a very high per flight hour number.
I suspect some of the shock comes from a lack of familiarity on your part with typical operating and maintenance expenses for ANY aircraft. Even the simplest Cessna 172 prop plane is EXPENSIVE to keep in a flyable condition. Jet engines run that number up A LOT more, and high performance jet engines even MORE so.
And that’s just for civilian aircraft that fly at low altitides low speeds, and don’t carry and advanced military avionics or weapons. Move up to a jet that can super cruise, carries the world’s most advanced radar systems, weapons systems, bleeding edge avionics, and fly at very high altitudes and handle like a Ferrari… It all adds up
It is any heavy aircraft, a B777 (a common passenger jet) costs about $28,800 an hour to operate.
In order to understand why this is it is helpful to understand how we come up with this number and how it can be different depending on how many hours a year the plane flies. A plane has required maintenance both on time and flight hours. You have to inspect the fan blades once in a 365 day period no matter what. So you spread that cost over every hour the plane flies. In order to understand whether your ‘revenue flight’ is going to make you any money you have to figure in all the things that make the plane fly; insurance, paying the pilots and crew, fuel, maintenance, ramp fees, etc etc. The less you use a plane the more each hour costs, it is why you might here an airline executive say something like “it costs money to have the plane sit on the ground.” They are right, you still have to pay maintenance even if it doesn’t fly, so it is better to have the plane operating 17 hours a day.
It isn’t much different in the military; the taxpayer needs to pay for these things, including paying the salaries of the two guys/gals sitting in the front, the loadmaster, the fuel, the spare parts, etc. If you can get a good idea of how many hours that plane will operate and under what conditions, you can properly budget your operational expenses for the year.
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.
1) They are at the cutting edge of technology in many ways & that is not cheap to either make or maintain, many of the parts have short use lifespans (supposedly) and need to be replaced frequently.
2) If the companies didn’t overcharge the DOD, where would they get the money to give multimillion dollar kickbacks to senators & congressmen from?!?
3) Maintenance takes a lot of man hours & the technicians and engineers involved are highly skilled and (hopefully) paid accordingly.
4) Jet fuel isn’t cheap and these things burn through a lot of it very quickly.
The government has no incentive to be financially efficient. In fact it’s quite the opposite.
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