The U.S. Navy’s elite cadre of fighter pilots—made famous by Top Gun—are not flying nearly often as they would like. Instead, many of the Navy’s elite Boeing F/A-18 Hornet strike fighter squadrons are sitting on the ground with only two or three flyable jets available. The rest of the jets are awaiting maintenance for want of critical spare parts—and some of those parts are being cannibalized from brand new jets in an increasingly vain attempt to keep squadrons flying.
“It’s pretty bad, ” said one veteran F/A-18 fighter pilot. “Some squadrons have found it difficult to keep more than a few jets up, while other squadrons are spending a tremendous amount of operational time away from home base, creating what Air Boss has called ‘the haves and the have nots.’”
The ‘have not’ units are those squadrons based at home in the United States that are not immediately preparing to deploy. The ‘haves’ are those either flying combat missions over Iraq and Syria or those from high-priority areas like the elite Japan-based units that are always kept at a very high level of readiness thanks to China and North Korea.
While that’s great for the units that get to fly on a regular basis, it is very bad for those squadrons that are not able to take to the skies. Pilots need to fly a certain number of hours per month in order to keep their skills sharp—that is the advantage of American aviators over foreign countries. Often, it’s less about
Article source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/17/navy-grounds-top-guns.html
