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You are 100% wrong. Cat 3 is a Major. They had less than 24hrs,
Proof
Posted on 10/16/2018 2:01:55 PM PDT by Beave Meister
The U.S. Air Force is assessing what damage more than a dozen F-22 Raptor fighters suffered when Tyndall Air Force Base sustained a direct hit from Hurricane Michael. Up to $2 billion in fighter jets were trapped on the ground because of maintenance issues and forced to ride out the Category 4 hurricane. Photographs show the hangars where F-22s were parked suffered severe damage.
First, the good news: Although Tyndall Air Force Base took a hard hit from the hurricane, all 3,600 military personnel and their families living on the base were successfully evacuated beforehand. The 93 Air Force personnel who stayed behind to keep an eye on the base are all safe and accounted for.
On the other hand: Up to 17 of Tyndall’s F-22s might have sustained damage or been destroyed during the storm. The aircraft, each of which cost $150 million, were unable to escape with the rest of the base’s F-22 fleet to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The jets left behind were parked inside hangars and officials hoped for the best.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
You are 100% wrong. Cat 3 is a Major. They had less than 24hrs,
Proof
Tyndall is a training base where fighter pilots learn to fly the F-22. There is a huge area over the Gulf where they can learn combat maneuvers and such. There isn't a great deal of other airspace available for such things. Avoid hurricanes and put them up north? Have fun in the Winter...
Bingo!~
Is he the CEO of some multi-million bank now?
Why don’t they have hardened concrete hangers for a plane this expensive?!
It’s on the coast where hurricanes hit!
Tell me, how long does that take. And give me the answer for a F-22, not for a P-40
Once upon a time, I was a recon platoon leader in an Air Cavalry Squadron. I was minding my own business with ambush patrol posted around the aviation base called Camp Holloway in Pleiku. I got a radio call that an aircraft had crashed off the end of the active. We moved fast and got to the crash site before anyone else. It was a UH1-H that had been in maintenance and was taking a test flight before returning to combat operations. It turns out that even ancient aircraft like the Huey requires a test flight before you can fly it on normal operations.
The crew was found about 10 feet down in the rice paddy. Their bodies were not pretty to look at. No one, from the Wing Commander down to the most junior pilot would have flown an aircraft that was in maintenance before they were reassembled, double checked, and taken on a test flight. There was no time to do that.
I think that you know that. Get real.
Thanks for your service and welcome home.
If you read my post, you would understand that I don’t disagree in even the smallest degree. I am not sure why you say I need to “get real”...I wasn’t advocating anything like patching them up or flying them away in a less than completely airworthy state in ANY of my posts.
I used to to be a jet mechanic, so that is an absolute given. Perhaps I misunderstood your post.
Your words:
I cannot believe, with that money on the line, that precious resource of those planes, that someone didn’t say “Okay. we have two days to get these planes out of here. Where can we get oversized flatbeds? We will need a crane to hoist them. Get working on it...”
Zero leadership. I have this mental image:
OFFICER: “Sir. That hurricane inbound is forecast to hit in four days and we have 17 F-22s we can’t fly out. What do you want us to do?”
FLAG OFFICER: “Well, not much we can do. Let’s put them in a hangar, tie them down, and hope for the best.”
I don’t know. When it is $50 million or even $100 million at stake, you might. But 2.5 BILLION?
For GOD’S sake, couldn’t you get bulldozers, dig large ditches, put the planes in them and cover them?????
ANYTHING? Damn, that is OUR money out there just pissed away.
Some people are gonna get court martialed over this.
Not sure I understand. In your post, you discussed a crew that crashed on a test flight, and the nature of your post focused on flying a vehicle that had undergone extensive maintenance.
Perhaps it is just a disconnect, but even in my post you excerpted, I didn’t say anything about flying out those planes that probably would have needed extensive maintenance to fly.
Sure, I talked about everything from flatbedding them out to digging trenches to put them in, but not flying them.
Your suggestions were nonsense, and in spite of your experience that I know from your many posts over the years, you jumped on the bandwagon by suggesting crazy ideas. Tell me what the MAC says about pulling the wings on 17 aircraft. tell me about the prep work required to load them on trucks. What equipment is needed to do that. Was it on hand? Where are the prime movers? Probably not at Tyndall. Etc, etc.
I understand nonsense from the idiots out there. But that’s not you. You know what you are talking about and had you been there, I suspect that you would have done exactly what they did. Unless, of course, you had a magic bean.
I am angry about it. Sure, I am not down there, so I have no idea what the conditions, roads, or even the airframes are like.
In my professor, I am used to having to solve issues which appear unsolvable and which may have life and death ramifications which might reflect directly back on me and my team, and I often have to do it by starting out and throwing everything against the wall, nothing barred, and that is what I did when I looked at this.
If you have to take part in those kind of frantic discussions, you put all those things out there, and then begin to take them apart and discard ones that won’t work, massage the ones that have any merit at all, then begin to throw those out as they become unworkable.
That is the process I went through in my mind as I read of this, saw red (I can be a hothead and irrationally so more often than I like) because of the huge waste involved.
Other people didn’t look at it that way. They read an article on the Internet and that set their base viewpoint on that. I didn’t, I just picked it up and picked it apart because I was on the go, in a hurry and that was the last thing I saw, and had my anger at the waste just boil over. When you try to solve things that way, in the light of more information as it becomes available, those deliberations don’t look that useful. You look at them and think “Boy, we must have been desperate to throw that out as an option...” in the light of day.
In retrospect, I think the valid questions, as some others have said (and answered) are why were that many of them unflyable (we know why)...why did we have those expensive resources there in the path of that kind of weather without adequate protection that more hardened structures would have provided and so on.
The airspace over the Gulf is also used for live air-to-air missile firings in support of DT&E, OT&E, and air-to-air WSEP. Tyndall has a separate drone runway to launch and recover the drones without flying over any populated areas.
I fully expect Tyndall to be rebuilt...hopefully to cat-5 standards.
Actually, you are correct. There are a lot more pictures available of an F-22 now than the last I looked. It appears the body and wings are one piece, or close to it. So much for my idea. Getting trucks in and getting them out would have taken too long as well, I suspect.
“Quintilius Varus, give me back my F-22s!”
Michael was just shy of Cat 5 status...in Cat 5 hurricane, it is expected that 100% of structures on land will be damaged or destroyed. Hard to build for that.
I can assure you that the wings are separate from the body.
I would expect that wing removal would be depot level maintenance item. There would not be any maintenance technicians qualified in wing removal/install at Tyndall. I would also expect that the tooling required would be similar to the tooling used for manufacturing. And that tooling would only be at the depot.
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