USAF F-15 now hibernating
The Aviation industry has suffered many blows to its health in the recent past. The USAF's beast the F-15 -once the powerhorse of the fleet- has now been reduced to eat the dust. Several occasions have forced the USAF to ground some of the planes in its fleet for the safety of Pilot & crew. The Air Force's F-15A, F-15B, F-15C and F-15D air superiority fighters routinely patrolled the skies over the United States before the intentional grounding -- that role is now filled by the smaller F-16 Fighting Falcon. A November 2 crash during a routine dog fighting maneuver in Missouri caused an F-15 to break apart in mid-air. The aircraft buckled and broke apart aft of the cockpit while performing an 8G dogfighting maneuver at 500 MPH.
Early analysis of Stilwell's crash and subsequent inspections of the grounded F-15s showed that cracks in the "longeron" main support beams aft of the cockpit were the cause of the crash. The Air Force discovered serious structural flaws of the longeron in eight aircraft."This is going to be a major problem, and it's going to be a difficult one to recover from," said retired Air Force Gen. Dick Hawley. "You could basically be without the nation's primary air superiority capability for an extended period of time, which puts us at risk". "In my opinion, based on the engineering data we had, we should not be surprised that we're finding some failures in the major structural areas of the airplane," added retired Gen. Gregory S. Martin. "The question wasn't if they would fail, it was when those failures would occur."
There is currently no end in sight for F-15 groundings. More thorough investigations of the 442 airframes could last through January and there is no guarantee that the fighters would take to the sky shortly after the inspections are completed.
Well-intentioned Gen. Dick Hawley is grossly overstating the facts. Unless Russia is going to attack us tomorrow with their Su-27s (and all the many, many variants thereof), the F-16 is more than capable of handling any and all threats in the air and on the ground. The 16 was designed first as a premiere air-to-air interceptor, but was relegated to air-to-mud roles by the Israelis in the 80's---something we do as well (a waste of a superb fighter IMO), but a task it performs equally admirably. Air, land, sea: the 16 and any of the other outstanding aircraft in our inventory such as the F/A-18 are perfectly capable of tearing apart any threat. Everyone relax and step away from the paper bags.