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> A recent RAND study found the cost of training a basic qualified fighter pilot ranges from $5.6 million for an F-16 pilot to $10.9 million for an F-22 pilot.
by driverdan 8y ago
> A recent RAND study found the cost of training a basic qualified fighter pilot ranges from $5.6 million for an F-16 pilot to $10.9 million for an F-22 pilot.
Those numbers seem outrageous to me. Why does it cost so much? Are there frequent plane crashes?
- kgilpin 8y agoJets cost a ton to operate, in fuel, maintenance and personnel.
- vasco 8y agoJust a single sortie is very expensive in just maintenance + supply. You need a whole crew to prepare a plane. Not to speak of the whole infrastructure required to train pilots, having places to fly from, teachers to learn from. It all adds up to a huge number, that when you divide by the number of pilots trained, doesn't get reduced by a lot.
- jcurbo 8y ago- Years of training on multiple platforms (initial pilot training, follow up training on the platform itself, possibly others) - Maintenance and logistics of those platforms - Probably amortizing the cost of those planes across each pilot using it for training
- adestefan 8y agoThe cost of the people to support all of that, too.
- openasocket 8y agoI'm guessing it has to do with flight time. Flying a jet is expensive. A jet will consume something like $10,000 of fuel per hour of flight time. Not to mention maintenance costs, the costs of the maintenance crew, the cost of having dedicated f-16s and f-22s for training is probably included in there as well. Not to mention what is probably a high dropout rate. All that adds up. $5.6M still sounds high to me, but I imagine there are a bunch of other costs I'm not thinking about.
- nradov 8y agoA lot of it is allocation of fixed costs. It costs a fortune to operate training programs. Lots of buildings, runways, infrastructure, staff, maintenance, security, etc. So they take that annual cost and divide by the number of pilots trained every year.
- maxxxxx 8y agoIt seems as expected to me. These planes cost tens of thousands per flight hour plus a huge support staff is needed. I don’t think they even fly that much.
- jwally 8y agoPer Wikipedia a B2 bomber has an hourly operational cost of $135,000. No idea how many hours you have to train on the thing in real life to become proficient; but at that rate...yeesh!
- souprock 8y agoThere was a flight for 44.3 hours, then without even stopping the engines another one of 30 hours. That makes for a $10,030,500 flight not even counting the bombs. https://www.uso.org/stories/253-inside-the-longest-bombing-run-ever https://www.uso.org/stories/253-inside-the-longest-bombing-r...
- maxxxxx 8y ago"Per Wikipedia a B2 bomber has an hourly operational cost of $135,000." I was thinking about this number when the B-2 flew over the Rose Bowl this year :-)
- NikolaNovak 8y agoCost of flying F-22 for an hour is reported anywhere between $33k and $70k, with most estimates in the $60k range. Let's assume $50k/hour to be safe - 200 hours of flight time gets you to the $10 million figure on its own, with no other costs accounted for. Pilot still ends up the cheap part of the equation, given ~$200mil+ per airplane cost. Whee - are we having budgetary fun yet :-)
- driverdan 8y agoI hadn't thought about the cost of flight time. That makes sense. To put what you said in another way, every hour an F-22 flys costs the same as hiring someone at a middle class wage for a year.
- rxhernandez 8y agoMy guess is that a substantial part of those costs are probably to pay a few people a middle class wage.
- jessaustin 8y ago"A few", as in 2500? That's roughly the number of working days in a year multiplied by the number of working hours in a military day. What are all those people doing, and is there a distinct set of people doing those things for every aircraft? There must be some other explanation...
- jl2718 8y agoRemember that our strategy against the soviets was to bankrupt them through military buildup in their massively corrupt and inefficient economic system. Back then, we could build things a lot cheaper than them, so we built a lot of stuff we didn’t need because they would have to try to keep up.
- jessaustin 8y agoThis wasn't so much a strategy as a backward explanation for why we were spending so much. They couldn't say the real reason, corruption. Now spending so much has been just as normalized as a "standing" army. No one still alive remembers what peacetime used to mean. So, they don't have to lie any more about "strategies" for the Soviets.
- briffle 8y agoHow much do you think it costs to fill up an F-15 with Jet Fuel? Not to mention the maintenance requirements on the planes (and the ground crews to do it) and the cost of ammunition used in training (missles aren't cheap)
- Synaesthesia 8y agoIt’s insane the wastage that goes into the army, and the environmental destruction.
- wil421 8y agoThink about the logistics of getting a class of pilots from the training sites, simulators, classrooms, housing, etc. Not to mention the costs to keep all those places open. Pilots have 100s or more of hours in simulators before they even touch a plane. Now add the costs of training in the actual plane and related training missions bombs, fake targets, bombing ranges etc...
- raverbashing 8y agoOne important detail is that not all pilots are going to be fighter pilots (which usually means less expensive trainings). C17s, KC-135s, A10s, C-130s make up a significant part of the USAF fleet, not to mention the smaller transport/utility craft