Mandatory retirement age for airplanes?

This past week Boeing announced that the youngest B-52 in service with the USAF had reached 50 years of age.

That’s right folks, the YOUNGEST aircraft in the USAF B-52 fleet has been flying for half a century. 76 B-52’s remain in the USAF fleet. The B-52 got its designation because it first flew in 1952.

It doesn’t end there, though – the B-52 fleet is expected to remain in service past 2040. That means some of the planes will have been flying for 80 years. It is conceivable that someone might fly into combat on the exact same bird their great grandfather flew on deterrence patrol. The 2040 date, for that matter, assumes that the retirement of the fleet (once scheduled for LAST CENTURY) isn’t pushed out AGAIN.

Why is the USAF flying such elderly aircraft? Well, let’s first note that while the B-52’s are the extreme for combat aircraft, they’re hardly the only aging birds in the fleet. In fact, the average age of the USAF’s 5,000+ aircraft is 23 years. For comparison, during Vietnam the average age was nine years.

The last KC-135, still the backbone of the aerial refueling fleet, rolled off the lines in 1965. There are still over 400 in inventory, including 183 assigned to active units. They are supplemented by a mere 60 of the ‘modern’ (last built 1987) KC-10. The FIRST delivery of the replacement, the KC-46 which I’m working on, is still years away.

The F-15 first flew in the 1970’s. The latest model, the F-15E, dates from the 1980’s… and is still in production for overseas customers though the last one for the USAF was built in 2001.

The C-130 first flew in the 1950’s.

OK, I think you get the picture.

But still… why are we flying 50 year old bombers? Well, for one thing, if we just retired them we’d lose 40% of the heavy bomber fleet. Aside from the B-52 there are only 20 B-2’s (1990’s) and about ninety B-1’s (1980’s) in service with NOTHING in the pipeline. OK, there’s the ‘next generation bomber’ or whatever we’re calling it now, but that’s essentially a blank sheet of paper with the earliest forecast delivery in the 2020’s.

Not all is doom and gloom! The F-35 is brand new. So new that although it first flew in 2006 it still isn’t cleared for operational use.

OK, maybe all is doom and gloom. Do we need a mandatory retirement age for airplanes?