Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Longest serving USAF Aircraft?

T-37 is not the oldest but it has been around quite awhile.
1954 to 2009. Wonder where they are now.
VNAF used to support us with them and they could fly very well.

The first operational B-52 was delivered in 1954. The first operational C-130 was delivered in 1956. Kind of comparing apples to oranges, the BUFF is a single purpose aircraft that was never exported while the C-130 has a multitude of variants and sold to numerous entities. The current BUFF (H model) was built between 1961~1963, would be interesting to see the age of the oldest C-130 still in service.

All that is true but it is all of a evolutionary rather than revolutionary nature. Consider the designs of the late 1950s and early 60s like the F-108 Rapier, the XB-70, the A-12 and SR-71. The performance of those designs has never been equaled, or in some ways even approached since then.

Sure, advances in missile technology made those designs dead ends but in lots of ways, designs like the F-16 and F-15 represented regressions, or scale backs in ambitions. Designers realized that lots technology needed for those other designs hadn't caught up to reality and while they were great advancements, the F-16 and F-15 were designed to fight in ways that the designers of the 1950s thought was going to be long gone by then.

Like I said, those guys given the advancements they had seen and the designs they were working on BACK THEN, would probably be surprised and disappointed that in 2015 there weren't bombers cruising a Mach 10 at 120,000 feet or space planes taking passengers from New York to Tokyo in 2 hours.

Where did you get your info on the WB-57R or any version with 4 engines? I couldn't find that info on your link.

The performance hasn't been equaled that you know of. There are a lot of things that aren't made known to the public for obvious reasons. The Blackbird officially didn't exist for a very long time.

I flew the F/A-18 for a while in the mid-90's. I can tell you that there is a very large capability differential between a 1960's era fighter and what we fly now. Raw speed, maybe not so much, but that's not where the combat capabilities of an aircraft lie. The advancements in avionics and weaponry are staggering. The precision of targeting compared to what was available then allows you to do with one JDAM what would have taken multiple sorties to accomplish back then, all with little collateral damage. The advancements in stealth and radar technology are amazing, there's so much information available to a pilot now that wasn't in the older aircraft that it's almost overwhelming trying to process it all in a fluid environment. I really can't emphasize enough how much more capable the later generation F/A-18's, F-15's, F-16's, F-22's, and F-35's are over their predecessors. It's night and day.

If raw speed is what impresses you then you likely won't see the differences, but trust me they're there. Nobody has seriously challenged American air superiority since the Vietnam era, there isn't anyone capable of it.

Now, actually go read my original post on the subject and see how unnecessary all that was you just wrote. As in I said this:

IIRC they did some flight testing of a radio controled F-16 out of Hickam AFB back in the early '70s. The airframe could sustain a higher G turn rate without damage than a human body can tolerate.

Sorry, I didn't recognize your brilliance in the matter. Carry on.

When all is said and done, I'd almost bet it'll be the C-130... and if not in longevity at least in hours flown. Currently I think there is 92 of 744 B-52's left with the newest having been built I believe in 1962, and if plans are met she'll be around until around 2040 making her some 78 years old when retired. But you have to remember these remaining B-52's are continually being climbed all over being maintained, upgraded and tweaked. Yet the average hours flown are only some 250 hours a year and the average plane only having some 13,000 hours!

Don't have the specs on the C-130 as to average hours flown per year and totals. But I'd suspect that its much higher and with many more as a percentage left of those built, not to mention I believe they're still building them or were at least until recently.

The C-130 is a workhorse that I believe will be around way past the last remaining 52's.

Phil


Phil

Although the old fighter pilot adage of "speed is life" certainly holds true, there is a world of difference between those two. Climb rates I'm sure are close (although I'm pretty sure the Eagle still holds the "0-100K" climb record, the 104 was a loser as a fighter. Horrible turn rate/radius, limited A-A armament and radar... Back to speed, mach 1.5 or even 2 won't help much when a AIM-9 or AAMRAM is coming at you a 5+. Then there's the F-22 and there, NOTHING even comes close in every valid measure of effectiveness as a fighter...

In 1986 I got a request for quotation to upgrade the B52s with new power supplies in the equipment rack. They wanted 100 different outputs. There was plenty of room. They wanted full up air force mil spec, so these would be very expensive power supplies to design.

I started to write a proposal, but management said to stop. They said we had two dozen engineers and we would need twice that many.

So I failed to respond. The customer called me up and screamed at me. No companies had responded to the RFQ. It was too big a job for our competitors too.