More than tens of thousands of dollars, military aircraft are incredibly expensive to operate and maintain. Beyond the obvious fuel costs, every hour of flight time is followed up by N hours of service.
If I remember correctly, the F-22 Raptor is the champ in terms of highest ratio of service required per hour of flight (40:1).
The F-35 clocks in at 4-8 hours of service per hour flown (6:1).
One example from the article linked below:
USMIL budgeted $39m dollars for the blue angels to fly 69 days in one year. It's up to 11 F/A-18 Hornets at once, but in my experience they only fly for a couple of minutes for a show.
Plus, who knows what kind of math games the military plays in terms of budget reporting. Operating commercial aircraft is already
very expensive, and military craft are an order of magnitude moreso.
The planes are beautiful, though <3, and remain operationally effective.
Military flying is way more complicated than man-hours per flight. For instance, ground servicing people also need to be trained. So double or triple the minimum man hours needed to accomidate those people being trained on the job. Military people also have a host of training/admin/command costs spread across the entire military complex. Then per-hour numbers dont accomidate the periodic maintenance not done at the home squadron but at a support facility elsewhere. Other costs are less a function of hours than duty cycles, paticularly engines. And aircraft like the f22 are irreplaceable, meaning their depretiation costs are more a matter of policy than simple math. Fighter squadrons are generally given a budget in dollars, but also airframe hours to accomidate fleet costs. Boiling everthing down to a per-hour budget is totally impractical.
Flight hours are flight hours, and it’s very rare to do any type of offensive air-to-air operation outside of an exercise, so I’m sure it was a great training opportunity.
Less thrilled about it as someone who happened to be on a flight transiting nearby airspace last night, and who is familiar with incidents like KAL 007.
Maybe not actually launching a missile, but 99% of the pilot job comes before the missile is launched. Going up to fight against other aircraft, doing everything up to actually launching a missile, is a daily thing at any fighter squadron. The great thing about not launching a missile is that you can practice dozens of engagements rather than the one or two oppertunities during a live fire event.
If I remember correctly, the F-22 Raptor is the champ in terms of highest ratio of service required per hour of flight (40:1).
The F-35 clocks in at 4-8 hours of service per hour flown (6:1).
One example from the article linked below:
USMIL budgeted $39m dollars for the blue angels to fly 69 days in one year. It's up to 11 F/A-18 Hornets at once, but in my experience they only fly for a couple of minutes for a show.
Plus, who knows what kind of math games the military plays in terms of budget reporting. Operating commercial aircraft is already very expensive, and military craft are an order of magnitude moreso.
The planes are beautiful, though <3, and remain operationally effective.
https://www.inverse.com/article/33711-military-flyover-costs...
Edit: Good points @elif and sandworm101, thank you!