Restoring aircraft....in 2060

[MarkVZ]

  These days you see many restoration projects of sixty-year-old WWII aircraft.  People hack their way through jungles and dig deep into thick ice to find what they can of the aircraft that flew nearly sixty years ago.  Several years of painstaking work, and many searches for parts later, some have produced flying aircraft from airframes that were exposed to the elements for nearly sixty years, after being abandoned following a crash or hard landing.  Millions are spent to  restore and fly these classics, preserving a  small bit of WWII for future generations.

My question is, in 2060, will there be restored B-2's, F117's, and F22's in the airshow circuit, as teary-eyed, 80-year-old veterans watch their old "friends" fly by in a salute to military aviation in the late 90's and early 00's?

Will anyone have the resources to restore one of these multi-billion dollar airframes to flying condition?  Will there even be any opportinity to retore one?  I mean when these things go down and their pilots punch out, there usually isn't much left of the airframe.  Who will have the technology and immense amounts of money to restore one of these?  Will the Air-Force just scrap all of them after service to prevent any technology from falling into another country's hands?

I doubt that many of the pilots of of WWII warbirds ever envisioned that there would be such a craze for WWII warbirds among enthusiests 60 years after the fact.  They wouldn't have dreamed of someone trying to re-create air battles of WWII on a computer, let alone the fact that computers would ever become popular, and in the super-advanced and cheap state that we find them in today.

 I can't help but wonder; will there be F117's, F22's, and B2's flying in 2060?  Or will getting one of these flying in 60 years be an impossible task?  



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Mark VanZwoll
33rd Strike Group

[hblair]

Great post Mark. Interesting points. It would take great resources to restore an F117, etc. to any kind of condition. I bet these planes will still be flying for the military 20 years from now.

[Toad]

You won't see many of the newer jets in private hands. First of all, the government isn't too keen on letting that kind of technology out of their control.

Second, they are hideously expensive to maintain and fly.

Even now the rich guys with the Sabres and MiG 15/17/21's pretty much only fly them to and from airshows because they get appearance money and free gas both ways.

I'd hate to think what it would cost to go sporting around in an Eagle for an hour!

[dosequis]

A better question is how many of the WW2 era warbirds will still be flying in 2060?

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