“You would have to retrain an entire workforce. The result would take many years and be very expensive, let alone the costs of producing an actual plane.”
It is worse than that. If you want produce new F-22s you would find a thousand tiny places where something is obsolete or should changed... Most of which you have no choice about. and then when you make the tweak something else breaks because you don’t have the original engineers there to tell you WHY it was done that original way. Costs would quickly sky rocket. Your better off taking the original and designing a new one that is the same basic capability. Same with the A-10.
Both of you are understandably incorrect. The very engineers who designed the F-22 are around. With Sequestration, many jobs dried up, and they went on to other jobs utilizing their talents. Many of the engineers were quite young in the pits. You will lose some of the older engineers, but certainly the majority are still out there, many underemployed at this time, they could retire, but hope the Trump Administration will give them another 10 years of employment. As for changes in design, your talking about materials, or new technologies that can be re-designed and retrofitted to engines, frames, wings exhaust nozzles, the talent is there, saying its too late is wasting that talent. To keep our design edge robust, you must keep employed and challenged the minds of our youth, the experience of our seasoned engineers, to pass on knowledge and experience to the engineers coming thru the ranks, and most importantly keep them employed and challenged to promote new people in schools wanting to become engineers and keep our edge in the world.
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