Aviation BS and Photo Thread

Two guys I know just got assigned the 145 out of ORD for Envoy

 

Nice!! Congrats!

 

Welcome to the thread!

 

Do we have any Air National Guard pilots in here?

 

Did a little cloud surfing in the Seminole today.

 

These buzzed around my house for a few nights playing war games or something and not running lights. I couldn't figure out what sort of helicopter it was until a few days later.

 

Aviation Nation, the Nellis AFB Air Show is this weekend, everybody come on down!

You know it's kind of a big deal when they have their own app in the Google/Apple store.

 

bah, if i could i would be flying out there to watch

 

Interesting choice of landing spot

 

@justinmbowen because boy..

 

We've been training out in the desert the last few weeks, operating without the usual amenities for aviation. These old girls are getting pretty filthy and the blades are being sandblasted to bare metal daily.

 

Jesus. your MX guys must be hating life right now

 

It's been rough but not terrible. The worst was a transmission replacement, the rest has mainly been accelerated wear and tear from the harsh environment.

 

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...^^^... A friend of mine flew AH-64's A's - IIRC ... in Desert Storm.

Then post the war .. he worked the contact job to refurb them via Agusta ... and the cost to refurb them was 50%+ of their original DoD contract cost ... due to harsh environmental operations.
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They definitely aren't cheap machines to operate or maintain.

 

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...^^^... Here is my little unofficial asymmetrical cost of the warfare rant (from my calculations) of his AH-64 and it's actual combat use ... doing this for fun now from memory 20+ years ago.

Considering he put about 25 missiles down range toward his target acquisition and used his chain gun maybe a total of 20 minutes in combat.

So, without DoD original equipment costs & training costs ....... just calculating maintenance, operational budget, ordinance budget & use refurb. budget for his combat missions in D/S.

The total cost to fire each smart missile was over a $1+Million (per shot) and much more expensive that the cost of the destroyed target.

My point is the ... "unbelievable hidden cost of warfare" ... and many civilians never see or understand the maintenance required or the cost of combat for each hour of use and/or target destroyed.

And .... getting into some of the more sophisticated fighters & bombers ... i.e. 16's, 18's, 22's, 35's, 117's, B-1's, B-2's and recon planes .... the cost per operational hour would be astronomical ... and the cost per combat hour and/or target destroyed would be super astronomical.

FWIW ... this is where our enemies have been focusing because they can't beat us in technology ... "asymmetrical financial warfare" ... to take us down.

 

A Hellfire costs on average $100k depending on variant, so shooting it at people is expensive but against a $2.2 million T-80 it's a bargain. Of course that is counterbalanced by the high cost of an Apache. Even upgrading existing D model airframes to E models runs about $25 million each.

 

Incredible photo. Thank you for sharing.