Minnesota Air National Guard Protecting Hawaii's Skies

[Kittrick]

I don't know if it's cause for alarm, but it's really disturbing that Minnesota's Air National Guard is protecting Hawaii's skies because of a shortage of planes due:

1) to the grounding of F-15's because of defects

2) Not enough fighter jets to go around because of the Iraq war.

With the F-15s in Massachusetts out of commission, the Vermont Air National Guard is covering the whole Northeast. The Minnesota Air National Guard is manning sites in Hawaii. In Louisiana, the Illinois Air National Guard has been filling in.

And with Oregon's fighters grounded, the California Air National Guard is standing watch for the entire West Coast, an area of more than 300,000 square miles that is home to more than 46 million people in California, Oregon, Washington, and slices of Arizona and Nevada.

The California Air National Guard said this is first time in history that a single state's fighter wing is providing coverage for an entire coast.

The California Guard is keeping three alert sites — in Riverside and Fresno, Calif., and Portland, Ore. — equipped and staffed with pilots and mechanics.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071226/ap_on_re_us/grounded_f15s

The article goes on to say that Alaska is now depending on Canadian fighter jets.

[joshuatree]

I don't think it's really defects but the fact that the F15C/Ds are old and the fact that they push these planes through rigorous cycles with simulated dogfighting that is causing the frame problems they are experiencing. The F15Es are fine but there are fewer of them. Most of the F16s have been deployed in Iraq. There aren't enough F22s yet. But I don't think it's alarming unless you think there's gonna be imminent war over our own airspace. This problem does demonstrate one thing clearly, we're so caught up with building high tech, expensive toys, we don't have enough of them for daily use.