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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Most of it is parts and labor for required maintenance.
Think of oil changes or replacing the brake pads on your car, and if you divided the price of those things by the number of miles between when you need them.
Then consider that for a fighter jet, it includes much more comprehensive and complicated maintenance with specialized parts and requiring expert knowledge, and that the aircraft have to be combat ready at all times, so the maintenance cycles are shorter.
It adds up pretty quick.
Most commercial planes (airliners, cargo planes, etc.) are designed for efficiency and longevity. They’re built to optimize the number of miles per dollar spent on overhead (maintenance, fuel, etc.). Military aircraft tend to be designed for optimal performance in their role, and have less of an incentive to chase profit margins by reducing operating costs. They have more expensive and more frequent maintenance cycles because that’s considered an acceptable tradeoff for high performance.
My initial reaction to this is that actually seems very inexpensive compared to something like Formula 1 teams.
That’s like asking “why does it cost way more for a race car to drive 100 miles than for my Toyota?”
These machines are purpose built for performance not for efficiency or lowest cost.
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!
Used to maintain military aircraft. They are old. You know how a grandpa could still walk just fine but may need a little bit of help? Well when he was younger he didnt need as much help. All he needed was some food and water and he was maintained. But now he needs a bunch of meds, retirement funds, social security, medical bills, needs a hip replaced, etc. Grandpa just needs more money to keep alive!
But we need him to complete the mission. And that is the number one priority. We dont care about how much money he makes for us, nor do we care how much he needs to keep alive. And because he is doing things that are a heck of a lot more aggressive, he needs a lot of maintenance.
Additionally, a lot of what we do is training flights. So we practice for war, which is expensive too. The number you cited is the average of all of this. But grandpa is doing just fine! And we are proud to have him still with us 🙂
An F-15 has about the same thrust as a 777 on a much, much smaller package and with significantly more varied and complex systems, and costs about $30k/hour to operate. The 777 costs about $30k/hr to operate at “free market rates”, so the military is actually pretty efficient.
The F-35 and F-22 are orders of magnitude more complex and cost correspondingly more to fly. A lot of this is down to maintenance of the radar absorbent paint, which is a fickle bitch to keep in good shape.
1. They’re as bullet proof as a flying machine can be and still get off the ground.
2. They have tons (literally, yes *tons*) of equipment that non-military don’t need, such as signal jammers, IFF and secure communications gear, networking hardware to integrate with other warplanes in the sky and people on the ground, bombs, missiles, bullets, lasers, infrared sensors, etc. In some planes, there’s even redundancy in the landing gear.
3. Everything in 2. above has redundancies in case something gets shot up.
4. Every computer case that I worked on in the USAF had a semi-hardened case, several layers of steel, and huge monster cables, etc, associated with it.
5. Most of that equipment is built specifically for the military because commercial gear just can’t keep up with the demands of warfare.
If I buy 1 soda it’s $1.00. If I buy 12 sodas, it’s $6.00.
The military has a combined 5k craft, vs the 200k commercial and private craft in the US. The commercial/private sector just has far more volume available to get the cost lower for operating and maintaining craft.
This is of course in addition to all of the other great answers being given.
There is a lot of actual technical reasons but a pretty meaningful reason is they take the money and put it in an envelope and send it to absurdly rich people and a lot of the military exists just to do that. there is a lot of military contracts where it’s not even what the military wants but some senator wants it to exist to send a large sum of money to their state or a specific company or to their share price or something similar.
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