Good morning, fuzzies :3 Welcome to the weekend! I am apparently flying back home for the holidays tomorrow, which means I am extremely not a ball of stress who is distracting herself by reading about airplanes! I hope that you are having a good day, and that you have a good weekend, and that if you are traveling it is fun and not at all stressful! And also, I was reading about the C-27J Spartans that were purchased and then sent immediately to Davis-Monthan to be mothballed.
That most of the reporting comes from Fox News and their ilk is a pretty good sign that the real purpose of that story was to gin up outrage about government overspending, the way the McDonalds hot-coffee-lawsuit story was meant to gin up outrage about tort reform. Obviously if the planes were complete and their mission no longer existed, it’s not like the Air Force could just send them back to Amazon and get a refund.
So what they’ve done, apparently, is transfer them to the Coast Guard (where they continue to be troublesome, so maybe the Spartan is just not a great airplane so that the USCG can transfer its C-130s to the United States Forest Service.
And I'm just… y’know.
Imagine what it’s like trying to manage spare parts for the USFS aircraft inventory, a fleet with a rotary arm that includes two dozen Vietnam-era UH-1Ds, an OH-58 Kiowa, a pair of AH-1 Cobras (!)*, and a single H-43 Huskie (?!), amongst various other cast-offs, and a fixed-wing arm that includes DC-10s, BAe-146s, various types of C-130s, P2Vs* (!), DHC-2 Beavers, MD-87s (??), and even if you can believe it a few purpose-built firefighting aircraft like the CL-415.
* The Firewatch Cobras and, I suspect, the P2Vs are listed but have been officially retired. That said, CAL FIRE definitely operates the OV-10 (and S-2 Tracker) and I’m sure the USFS will get those when the Californias are tired of them, so…
I am pretty certain the only reason the USFS is not currently operating SR-71s is because they did not have a place to store them. They are absolutely one billion percent going to have a fleet of dubious V-22s once the services start replacing them :P
