honest question, why not just fly them to another base out of the hurricane path ? surely there was more then enough time for that even if it was not a certainty it would hit them, it would be better then the alternative no?

From the article in the link:

!!!!!

1. Read topic

2. Don't even read ANYTHING that has been posted, and post some silly stuff! ( I know GTA eleventeen, no time to think)

3. Well, he knows now and so do we.

I am going to try to get the last word in. Here's that poor districts brand new congress malleable object!

Matts Wiki

Bottom line...AirForce, DOD, NSC were asleep at the wheel.

I still would LOVE to get an answer if Gen (generic) "People are are most important asset" person left the USA's most secret, important, interceptor program unguarded.

Gee! General LOSER, nice to know every American martyr since the dawn of time have wasted their lives defending important assets.

Since Im the one who made the comment about people being the most important asset the Air Force has....what kind of generic answer would like me to give you Nixer?

How about...

"Run from the Alamo?"

That was completely irrevelant!

Joe Biden looks out a window and agrees.

Perspective:

The US lost 28 fixed wing aircraft in combat in Desert Storm.

Yet we lose/damage 17 F-22's to a different kind of storm at home we knew was coming.


What a joke.

I thought of another "dimension" of this though - does the USAF purchase insurance on things like this?

"Whole nother can of worms" and questions arise if that's the case.......

Only 17 out of 55 aircraft non flyable represents a 70% availability, which is about 20% above usual. USAF did a good job, Monday morning quarterbacks notwithstanding.

We are not talking about readiness levels, we are talking about asset protection. It's not even so much about 2.5 billion dollars (a drop in the bucket in our military budget), these things are NOT REPLACEABLE.

...and IMO this has nothing to do with Monday Morning Quarterbacking. You can make the argument that not setting up shelters to withstand a CAT5 hurricane was a calculated risk. Now that the damage is done, saying that "it obviously wasn't" the right choice would be MMQing. But like Zamzow pointed out, focusing on the monetary value misses the point given that these birds are one of a kind, no longer produced, and may actually be permanently lost. Which means that their true value skyrockets, as long as these still are superior interceptor aircraft.
And that is IMO the sole adequate perspective to look at the risk presented.

That shelters couldn't be created as the hurricane was forming is obvious. At that point the planes were doomed already. But someone must have made the patently wrong decision that the site didn't need hardened shelters; maybe that was at a point when there were no Raptors in the fleet. But in that case someone else failed to reassess the risk when the F-22 production was terminated. As soon as that decision was announced the value of the existing assets went up dramatically, and the Pentagon failed to draw the right conclusions from it.

You may find emotionally relatable reasons why this was normal human error but at the end of the day only the result counts. The disingenious line of defense that the airforce established with the statement that the successfully protected human life is mere spin doctoring. You actually can produce more pilots, but you can't produce more Raptors. The architect of the collapsed bridge in Genoa doesn't get a pass either even if he pointed out the need for lots and lots of maintenance. At the end of the day the design turned out to be dangerous, at the tremendous expense of other people's lives and money. So why whould the airforce be above criticism? They failed to protect an irreplacable asset, and it wasn't fate. It was erroneous risk assessment that better procedures and smarter thinking could and should have avoided.

Can't fly out if they're not capable of flight, therefore readiness level.

No, it isn't. To have gotten even one more Raptor out of Tyndall before Michael came ashore, were it even possible, would have required HUMANS to stayed longer in harm's way. The call was made that doing so was not worth the risk. Rehashing that decision now is the very definition of monday morning quarterbacking.

So...was it ok to leave them unguarded then? (If they did)

It's more like reviewing 20 year old history and analyzing mistakes than Monday Morning quarterbacking. The AF should have made provisions to protect a large number of F-22's when they moved training there.

From the article in the O.P.:


I suspect the planes were guarded, to the extent that one can during severe storm conditions.



Yeah, it sure doesn't look good. I don't know what the sequence of events was as far as the decisions to base there vs. the cancellation of further F-22 production, etc. I don't know what all the various considerations were that lead to basing there, vs. somewhere else.

In light of the many things I don't know about it, at this point in time I'm not terribly disgusted with the Air Force. That may change depending on what information comes to light. I am inclined to think some of this lies at the feet of Congress, since funding for the military is always an issue, and that likely factors into the dearth of sufficiently hard shelters at that location. But I don't know, and when it comes to this stuff, I try to remain mindful of that.

Hopefully, going forward,... improved decisions related to this will be made.

+1



There is a lot that NONE OF US know about this, but it doesn't stop some from pontificating on how everything would have been done better if only they were running the show!