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Comment by VBprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Only on paper. Let's face it if the pilots weren't flying intercepts they'd need to be flying training missions. Anyway, the sunk cost of buying, maintaining and operating fighter jets is so high that the marginal cost of a mission is a bit of a wash.

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>Let's face it if the pilots weren't flying intercepts they'd need to be flying training missions

Is this really the case? Are there training missions 24/7? If not, does flying an intercept cause a future training mission to be canceled?

I dont think this nitpicking achieves anything, his overall point stands - we have hundreds of military jets and pilots with fuck all to do (fortunately). How many intercepts are there, one every few months? It makes no material difference against the backdrop of training and eqipment used in a regular business as usual.

> I dont think this nitpicking achieves anything, his overall point stands - we have hundreds of military jets and pilots with fuck all to do (fortunately). How many intercepts are there, one every few months? It makes no material difference against the backdrop of training and eqipment used in a regular business as usual.

Maybe stores should stop hiring security guards in towns where the police don't have much to do. The cops are just sitting around anyway, right?

Cops don't have to make flight hours, fighter pilots do.

If police had the same kind of rigorous training and process the military does this mess in the USA probably wouldn't have happened.

This whole line of argument does not make sence - the whole debacle is about safety, not money.

Why do you believe the current training and safety regime is economically optimal? It is possible that having more cheaper airplanes and pilots that crash a little more often would be better for economy!

I'm not sure how the military work when it comes to currency requirements. For private and commercial pilots it's certainly the case that they sometimes have to conduct flights (or at least, conduct specific procedures) purely for the sake of maintaining currency. I would be surprised if the same concept didn't apply broadly.

It's not quite as strong as because you flew that mission we are cancelling that training session, more because you flew that mission you don't need be booked out on a training session.

Pretty much. They're on alert 24/7 anyway, and training is mostly to get a specific number of hours. There are likely cases where an intercept adds to monthly flight hours, but it's not a big impact overall.

No, but if you need to flow so many hours per month to maintain currency, flying a mission still counts towards that. So every hour spent flying a mission is an hour that doesn’t need to be spent flying to maintain currency.

At least in Germany they tend to do a lunch break which is great if you want to use their airspace to test some research equipment. (You don't get told their schedule, only whether it's in use, but if it is it usually works out to sit on the runway with your plane at ~13h and wait for them to take the break.)

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