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A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

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Re: A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

#221

Post by tootie »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #174
xnyan wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever killed someone without a gun? Not trying to be metal, but I was in a self defense situation many years ago and and something terrible happened. Shooting a gun vs using "household chemicals and gasoline" to attack someone, to say nothing of knives or bare hands, are so apart from each other that I know for a fact that you have no experience with violence or how much easier it is to do violence with a gun…

And I don't want people to die because a tyrannical government decides it needs to occupy the population. It's acceptable to me that some people will die as a result of gun violence, if it means the citizenry keeps its right to bear arms. Every homicide is a tragedy, but the weapons are not the problem nor the cause. If you want to restrict the rights afforded by the 2nd amendment, would you like to restrict some oth…

I would like to restrict only the second amendment. I don't see how a slippery slope argument is remotely relevant. There are dozens of liberal democracies in the world that have robust personal freedom and no right to bear arms. In fact, our right to bear arms is a direct descendent of the British Common Law version that existed for centuries and has been almost completely removed in the 20th century with no loss of free speech or press and no descent into tyranny. The country whose tyranny the founders were worried about.

Re: A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

#222

Post by fock »

btgeekboy wrote: post #79
fock wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) like the article states, infact these things are not disarmed at all. and yeah federal contracts... Who else was he contracting again currently and what's the purpose of the whole endeavour then (there's definitely more money there except for fleecing the air force...). I would understand allowing such a business when it was a direct front for CIA-CAS (which it very well might be), but just to extend the private c…

I think “disarm” here was used in the sense of reloading ammo vs. making the weapon itself usable or not.

as I outlined in the other answer, you don't need a lot of weapons to counter non-NATO/China/Russia-air forces. And I'm sure, a person buying state of the art fighter jets can buy some surplus Sidewinder or Maverick missiles as well...

Re: A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

#223

Post by inamberclad »

Any chance a FSDO or DPE is on here? What's the registration process for these aircraft? Do they get N-numbers? I'm assuming they're registered as experimental or experimental-exhibition. Do the pilots need type certificates? Who provides the training?

Re: A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

#224

Post by ShakataGaNai »

wazoox wrote: post #212

I don't understand what's the point of having a private contractor instead of say, a dedicated Air Force squadron. A private contractor who effectively has a monopoly is necessarily more expensive, as he needs to make a profit, while an Air Force squadron doesn't. Looks like some sort of elaborate public money scam to me.

It ends up being a cost optimization & liability thing. Lets be honest, at least in the USA, our Government isn't terribly efficient with money. However, a corporate is driven by profit so they will be smarter.

If you had an Air Force squadron of older planes, they need their own dedicated mechanics who are certified. Government certified vendors, who've gone through the vetting/price bidding process (likely the vendors selling you the latest F35 or whatever will want in on it too...). Dedicate pilots certified to fly these planes and likely only these planes... etc. Instead you shift the logistics to a smaller and more agile group who can optimize for their very specific and small use case.

The private contractor can also go out and train people from other military forces (like Canadians, eh?). That allows them to make money from multiple sources, where as the US Government would not. Sure maybe join training exercises, but that's not the same thing.

There are a lot of cases in business where outsourcing something specialized to another party makes a lot of sense - unless there is a huge scale for it. Just look at The Cloud. For a lot of companies, it doesn't make sense to pay the overhead of datacenters, datacenter techs, etc etc. For a few companies, that do it at scale, it makes a ton of sense (Ex FAANG).

Re: A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

#225

Post by angry_octet »

balls187 wrote: post #126
justaguyhere wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too am amazed that this is even possible, but for different reasons. Do other first world countries allow non-government companies to hold this much sophisticated military hardware? Maybe so, I just haven't heard of it. The other day I was reading about some Saudi prince's half a billion (!!!) dollar yacht. Sometimes I wonder if I live in the same planet as these people. It is hard for me to imagine such wealth and…

> Do other first world countries allow non-government companies to hold this much sophisticated military hardware? No, they don't. And neither does the US. The F18 is now nearly 40 years old. Typically the advanced and sophisticated aspects of airframes are not allowed for sale, to private entities, or even non-us government ones. The advanced avionics, weapons systems, etc, are all tightly controlled.

Exactly, the sale of these aircraft has to be approved by the US Govt. The sale of a squadron to Canada was also approved by the US. It is only because of the close AU-US relationship that these are supplied with electronics -- everything about them still being classifed TS.

Re: A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

#226

Post by bkohlmann »

wolf550e wrote: post #135

But surely the private pilots training against US military pilots get to see the current tactics, and the private radars and electronic warfare pods get to record the current combat settings of US military radars and electronic warfare systems. There is no way this is not all classified top secret and a major target for foreign intelligence. So all his personnel, pilots and technicians, need clearance as if they were…

Nearly all pilots are former US military (or allied countries) and contractors often get military security clearances. All the pilots flying these jets will have a vetted, active clearance commensurate with the types of tactics they are simulating / seeing from the military planes.

Re: A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

#227

Post by HideousKojima »

magduf wrote: post #148
parsimo2010 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's often more expensive to create specialized training capabilities in house. Contractors have an advantage with both equipment and personnel costs. A contractor can maintain their jets however they want as long as it's safe and they can meet their contract requirements. The contract maintainers can stay at their job as long as they want. The USN and USAF maintainers move every few years and have pretty good retire…

Sounds to me like the military is simply shooting itself in the food with its "up or out" policies. Why force highly-trained and experienced people to leave just because they've gotten to a plateau in their career where they're both competent and comfortable? Do foreign militaries also have these policies?

In WW2 Germany specificallydidn't take skilled pilots out of combat. This is why lists of WW2 aces are dominated by the Germans, but it also had the side effect that those experienced pilots weren't around to train new pilots, contributing to the degradation of Germany's air capabilities towards the end of the war

Re: A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

#228

Post by [deleted] »

lostmsu wrote: post #72
parsimo2010 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's often more expensive to create specialized training capabilities in house. Contractors have an advantage with both equipment and personnel costs. A contractor can maintain their jets however they want as long as it's safe and they can meet their contract requirements. The contract maintainers can stay at their job as long as they want. The USN and USAF maintainers move every few years and have pretty good retire…

It might also be beneficial to have a training combatant, who is not in the same chain of command as the trainees. Gives external perspective, and reduces the chance of collusion to show "good results" if done right.

[deleted]

Re: A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

#229

Post by TechBro8615 »

tootie wrote: post #221
TechBro8615 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I don't want people to die because a tyrannical government decides it needs to occupy the population. It's acceptable to me that some people will die as a result of gun violence, if it means the citizenry keeps its right to bear arms. Every homicide is a tragedy, but the weapons are not the problem nor the cause. If you want to restrict the rights afforded by the 2nd amendment, would you like to restrict some oth…

I would like to restrict only the second amendment. I don't see how a slippery slope argument is remotely relevant. There are dozens of liberal democracies in the world that have robust personal freedom and no right to bear arms. In fact, our right to bear arms is a direct descendent of the British Common Law version that existed for centuries and has been almost completely removed in the 20th century with no loss of…

> I would like to restrict only the second amendment.

At least you admit it.

There are ways to do this. You can get a supermajority in congress to agree with you, or you can get 34 state legislatures to agree to call a convention of states. Then, and only then, you can change the constitution.

Barring that, no law or executive order can restrict the second amendment and be constitutional. Fortunately our current president has appointed justices who will ensure this remains true.

Re: A man owns the most advanced private air force after buying 46 F/A-18s

#230

Post by manfredo »

fock wrote: post #218
manfredo wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless your cobalt mine in the Congo is generating billions in revenue, fending them off with modern combat aircraft is probably going to be a net loss. It's not uncommon to have maintenance costs of $10,000 or more per flight hour (the F-35 is apparently $20,000). A fleet of 46 aircraft flying, say, 8 hours per day is going to cost $110,400,000 per month at a $10,000 flight hour cost.

you won't need the full fleet to fend off any neighboring country – and as I said they offer the whole range now: from small prop-based CAS to state of the art (at least for everyone non-NATO, China or Russia) air superiority. And I wouldn't really worry about the amount of cash available in such conflicts. In the past it generally was enough for leaders to bribe their way into being accepted citizens of the western…

Right, but now you're talking about using mercenaries to fight a civil war and vie for power over a sovereign nation. That's much higher stakes than a cobalt mine. Mercenaries in air forces have existed, but usually in the form of hiring pilots and maintenance crews to operate aircraft owned by one of the belligerent nations. This is what occurred in the Eritrean-Ethiopian war. These countries brought up former Soviet aircraft and munitions following the end of the cold war, and also hired ex-soviet pilots and ground crews to operate them. But this is a significant war with hundreds of thousands of combatants on both sides.
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