F16 is FAA certified

I understood it costs the US military something over a million dollars to train each pilot, and that was probably 20 or more years ago. Utilizing ex-military pilots is effectively a service life extension that reduces the number of new military pilots that need to be trained, it’s not just the direct pay rate and benefits cost that is the issue.

The fact that the contract flying is in itself done in the service of pilot training gets you into some funny mathematics

These ‘adversary’ planes will be flying every day, not sure how that plays into the cost calculation but for whatever it’s worth it’s not an occasional activity.

Silvaire wrote:

I have no idea if outsourcing aggressor type roles saves the Federal Government money or costs them money. There are a lot of factors on both sides of the equation. Using retiree pilots that have already been trained and endowed with benefits would be one positive.

Maintaining 40 year old super complex aircraft is very expensive, at least if any sort of availability is sought. The government/military can do this, and do on several occasions, because it can simply route recourses into it. A civilian company cannot operate like that.

The F-16 maintenance system is more like a complex factory than the type of general maintenance we think about in GA. It is a complete infrastructure made for the F-16 exclusively. Just keeping the engines in shape requires a test facility worth more than a handful of those old aircraft. I think maybe this is a factor. Existing maintenance infrastructure can be (re)used, as well as people operating it (The F-35 has a different maintenance system altogether, a different concept, and cannot be used for the F-16). The pilot salary is a drop in the ocean in comparison, but there are lots of highly experienced F-16 pilots around, which is beneficial. The F-16 is still produced, and there are lots of them, which also is very advantageous.

Still, how they are going to make this work is a bit of a mystery to me. It will not be cheap. Maybe it’s simply because any other alternative would be more expensive all things considered? The military only need a small handful of those aircraft operational, and only occasionally, so everything can be kept very low key?

Maoraigh wrote:

The contractor pilots are said to be ex-military. Presumably on military pensions

You need to keep the brilliant military pilots motivated: if you do well in army you may get to fly an F16 on civvy reg

The contractor pilots are said to be ex-military. Presumably on military pensions. They should keep that pension in civil employment.
(I’m on a Scottish Teacher pension. If I returned to full-time teaching in Scotland I would have it stopped for as long as I did so. Other employment wouldn’t affect it.)

T28 wrote:

a contractor is paid more than a service personnel

That is only one part of the equation for the cost of operating a jet aircraft service. If we only look at personnel salary costs, though, productivity vs salary is a more relevant figure than pure salary.
In my (Spanish) air force days salaries were low but productivity was appalling. Per-flight-hour costs were horrendous. I subsequently learnt very different and much more efficient and cheaper ways to maintain and operate aircraft in the civilian business. Could those have been applied in the military huge savings (with higher salaries) would have resulted.

Of course there are multiple other reasons why you may not want to run a defense force like a civilian business, but that is a different matter and definitely, agressor / sparring training aircraft may not qualify under those reasons.

http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=2c80fa72-2fb8-4984-a5e7-865526eaa852

I just remembered something from a past life in which I was involved with a US Federal civilian contractor using an ex-military non-FAA TC’d aircraft for R&D. In that case the approval for operation was based on the plane being used for ‘public service’ and was relatively simple. The issue came when the contract ran out…. The plane could not be flown without ‘public service’ airworthiness paperwork and as result had no market value.

It’d probably be better @T28, if you didn’t use me as a vehicle for sarcastic posts, particularly as in this instance your “paraphrasing” is the opposite of what I might actually say: I think US Federal Government should stick to its Constitutional role, including the military (national defense), and we should force them to that just as much as we should restrict expansion beyond their proper role. Otherwise you end up e.g. with an ineffective outsourced UK CAA instead of the FAA (interstate commerce), which does about as well as government can, i.e. not fantastic but better than the alternate.

I have no idea if outsourcing aggressor type roles saves the Federal Government money or costs them money. There are a lot of factors on both sides of the equation. Using retiree pilots that have already been trained and endowed with benefits would be one positive.

I think the F16 etc pilots are ex-military. Seniority and promotion might make service personnel more expensive.

They are ex military, but a contractor is paid more than a service personnel (because you have to bake in variability and commercial margin in the figures).

I wonder if the contractors concerned have it easier importing their hardware compared to others?

Not really, they still have to get DoD approval. Which is a waste of money if you think about it – the Treasury is paying a private entity to come up with an approval dossier, then is paying DoD to review the dossier to basically approve a purchase that only happens because the state sees a need for it (so DoD could just as well execute a purchase directly like it did our F5s without wasting time and money on the two previous steps).

To paraphrase Silvaire, one can only praise the strongly federalist and lean-goverment american DNA that allows “we the people” to have a strong say on the matter, keep Washington in check and prevent such wastage of taxpayer money.