Air Force Steps Up Effort To Care for Its Aging Aircraft.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

Some of the B-52 long-range bombers that so relentlessly pounded Taliban and al Qaeda fortifications in Afghanistan are more than 40 years old, and the U.S. Air Force plans to keep flying them for another four decades. If they do, officials said, it will be like bombing Osama bin Laden with aircraft built by the Wright brothers.

The Air Force knows that it has problems with aging aircraft, and it is seeking new solutions for them. "We have 6,300 aircraft, and they're all aging," said Col. Rosanne Bailey, director of the service's new Aging Aircraft System Program Office, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio. Bailey is scheduled for promotion to brigadier general later this month. The Aging Aircraft SPO was established in 2001 as a wing-level organization, within the Aeronautical Systems Center, to develop and implement a comprehensive modernization plan for the Air Force's fleet of planes, she said.

The average Air Force aircraft is more than 22 years old, Lt. Gen. Michael Zettler, deputy chief of staff for installations and logistics, told a recent Pentagon news briefing. The average age will continue to rise, he said, even if the service is able to acquire new generations of platforms, such as the F-22 air dominance fighter and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. "If we buy all the aircraft that are in our future years defense plan, the average age will grow to 30 by 2015."

The older an aircraft, the more difficult and expensive it is to maintain, the Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. John P. Jumper, told a DFI International seminar in Washington, D.C.

"We have more than 100 Boeing 707 platforms right now at our logistics facility at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, just for corrosion and aging aircraft problems," he said. "Those airplanes that used to spend four or five months in depot status are now spending upwards of a year in depot status, just because of the aging problem." Jumper said he would like to replace the B-707s with B-767s.

The age factor affects all categories of aircraft in the Air Force fleet, officials said. They cited these examples:

* B-52s, which flew thousands of miles from the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to hit Taliban and al Qaeda fortifications, first deployed in 1955.

* C-130 Hercules transports, which dropped U.S. special operations forces into Taliban-controlled territory, began service in 1956.

* KC-135 Stratotankers, whose refueling capabilities enabled U.S. long-range bombers to reach...