Defense One peers into the trouble the US Air Force has in getting the military cargo hauler’s flying….
That even after we, the taxpayers spent BILLIONS to upgrade the aircrafts….
Remember ?
We just had the biggest Defense budget passed in a LONG time for a Pentagon that hasn’t had an overall budget audit since when?….NEVER.….
Lockheed Martin this week announced that it has finished installing new engines and a slew of other upgrades to the Air Force’s C-5 Galaxy, the largest aircraft in the U.S. military. The formal name for the improvement project was “Reliability Enhancement and Re-engining Program.” The project was supposed to drastically improve the reliability of the massive planes so much, the Air Force changed the planes name to the Super Galaxy.
Now after spending $7 billion to update the C-5, it turns out the Air Force doesn’t have the money to fly all of those planes. Last year, service officials said they had parked 12 C-5s in what the military calls back-up status. The planes are essentially in purgatory, somewhere between active and retired aircraft.
So despite the improvements, the overall fleet’s reliability has been steadily declining, apparently thanks to the parked planes and a 2017 landing gear problem. Mission capable rates fell nearly 9 percent between 2015 and 2017, according to Air Force data. Last year, the service’s 48 C-5Ms had a mission capable rate — that is, the portion of the fleet fully available for a mission — of just 60 percent….
image….af.mil