A Look At The U.S. Air Force's Fleet Using Age And Mission-Capable Rates In The Middle East Fight

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James Hasik, Real Clear Defense/Atlantic Council: Newer Aircraft, Bigger Bills

In the USAF, mission-capable rates are not a matter of age or scale efficiencies.

In Air Force Times this week, Jeff Schogol pulled some descriptive statistics from USAF records to report on “which aircraft are most mission-ready”. His list included the various types of attack, bomber, cargo (including gunship and electronic warfare), fighter, rescue helicopter, tilt-rotor, tanker, and drone aircraft currently flying in the Middle East. Mission-capable rates—the percentage of time that an airplane possibly needed for a mission actually was ready for a mission—varied over the past year from 92 percent for the MQ-1B Predator down to 47 percent for the B-1B Lancer. What the table didn’t show was how those rates related to his other two descriptors: the size of the USAF’s fleet of that aircraft type, and the average age of the aircraft in that fleet.

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WNU Editor: There are a lot of old planes in this fleet.