New lease of life for Tristars in private air refueling

[andrewn]

The Germans are another good example, look at the life they got out of their Phantom's and the life they are planning to get out of the Tornado's.

[SCARECROW]

They have that place called AMARC that produces lots of spares from retired airframes, what do we have? RTP!!

Got Shawbury AMSU !

[bizfreeq]

I like how the USA, seem to get years more use out of its aircraft then we seem to do.
Look how old some of the types they still fly are.
Can you really say then that the Tristars are to old and knackered.

That would be because their fleets consist of hundreds in number not tens like ours and therefore the wear and tear on airframes is greatly reduced. Also they have a lot more money to spend, at least until recently

[Davef68]

I think you will find we put more hours on our airframes relatively quickly compared with the US.

Phil

Indeed, because we have far fewer - I beleive our C17s are the highest houred per airframe fleet out of all the operators.

The Tristars will no doubt be used to support USMC and USN non-operational missions, freeing up the USAF's more limited HDU assets for operational missions