On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 08:52:32 -0700, David Lednicer
wrote:

What a crock! Those tankers have been rigorously maintained for their
entire lives. Age doesn't enter into it. The B-52 is of the same vintage
and continues to provide except service. Until this recent 767 debacle the
Air Force said the tankers would not need to be replaced until 2020. As
Nader said, this clearly "corporate giveaway" to the ailing Boeing at the
expense of the American taxpayers.

Nonsense! Aluminum fatigues - the KC-135s have all had to have
horizontal tails cannibalized from 707s retrofitted to keep them in
service. Systems fail and parts are hard to find for aircraft as old as
the KC-135s. Airliners have finite lives and the KC-135s are coming to
the end of theirs.

Any aircraft can be maintained in serviceable condition indefinitely
if one is willing to pay the costs. With the B-52 fleet, virtually
every part on every bird has been replaced more than once; that gets
very expensive when parts are specific to a particular aircraft type
that has been out of production for decades. Fortunately, the Boeing
engineers designed such a rugged and capable bird that it is still
capable of performing its heavy/nuclear bombing mission fifty years
after it first entered service, and despite all the changes in either
mission or warload over that period. Part of the reason for this
"over-engineering" was the willingness of the only buyer -- the U.S.
Air Force -- to pay almost any price to get exactly what it needed and
wanted on an exclusive basis.

OTOH, the R&D costs have long since been amortized and the aircraft
itself has changed very little (other than continuing improvements in
electronic systems) in decades, so producing replacement parts for the
B-52 is probably considerably less expensive today than it was when
the aircraft was still in production. It's also the only way to keep
the B-52s in service of course, short of rebuilding the assembly lines
and producing new aircraft. (When it comes to projecting a U.S.
military presence, the B-52 is not just any old aircraft; it is
uniquely American, distinctive in appearance, and to many people
synonymous with U.S. nuclear and conventional bombing capability.)

The KC-135 is essentially just one version of the aircraft most of the
world knows as the Boeing 707, and was designed with mass production
in mind. The original aircraft design was influenced to some degree
by the necessity of making it competitive price-wise with similar
designs from other companies. Neither jetliners nor military aerial
tankers are usually exposed to the sort of strains placed on heavy
bombers; nor are they intended to continue in service anywhere near as
long as the B-52 has flown, since expected improvements in technology
essentially guarantee their eventual obsolescence and retirement from
regular service. (I hate to use the term "planned obsolescence", but
in one sense that is what we're talking about.) The civilian Boeing
707, once the most common jetliner on international, transcontinental
and transoceanic routes, has long since been retired by almost all the
world's airlines -- which actually made it economically feasible for
the Air Force to keep the KC-135 flying a few years longer, since
plenty of retired aircraft with still-usable parts were available
(cheap!) for cannibalization. After more than 20 years of this
practice, however, the best parts-donor aircraft have already been
taken and prices for the remaining 707s are going up.

Add to this an increased mission for the aerial tanker force. Used to
be, only a relative few military aircraft were equipped for in-flight
refueling. These days, practically everything that goes into a war
zone has either a boom receptacle or a probe -- and, as we saw in both
Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, that can mean a lot of thirsty birds
in search of someplace to get a drink. Today's larger tankers are not
only equipped with both boom and probe-and-drogue, but in some cases
are actually able to refuel more aircraft before returning to base
with dry tanks; that means more fill-ups from a single tanker and thus
fewer tankers required in or near hostile airspace.

___
Walter Luffman Medina, TN USA
Amateur curmudgeon, equal-opportunity annoyer