And I know many of the young men who fly these ancient aircraft. You can only upgrade for so long.
We have flown our airplanes to death these last 20+ years.
Think about a car, no matter how much you maintain it and baby it parts wear out. Now, make it a race car built to the highest specifications with the metal stressed to the highest limits to save all the weight possible. Load it with tons of dead mass (bombs and rockets), driving on a rough track and see what happens. It will not last, the metal will fatigue and fail. If for some reason you don’t understand the analogy, we have built extremely high performance aircraft with the lightest frames possible, load them with bombs, fly them in very rough air, put them through high G maneuvers at high speeds and expect them to last forever. They simply will not last.
What this country is doing to our military is shameful. We will pay a terrible price for it some day. I am afraid it will not be long from now.
True, to a point.
Some of these AC are like the “original” axe George Washington used to cut down the cherry tree.... They have replaced the handle six times and the head four...
Still...Most people would be amazed at what is allowed in the air.