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Chavez threatens to lauch "fighter aircraft" if the Navy P-3's infringes on his airspace again....

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id ... _article=1

This got me to thinking, somewhere around '95ish timeframe, the entire fleet of Venezuelan F-16's surpassed 3,000 hours, they had 24 Block 15's, averaged out, that's only 125 hours per airframe over a 10 year period... I can't imagine that they put a ton of more hours on them by now...

Anybody know what kind of condition their planes are in nowadays?? I know because of Chavez they can't get any spare parts but anybody care to guess if they're still flying them?? Must be in pristine shape because there are so few hours on them....

Smitty

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Elite Joined: Jan 31, 2004 Posts: 1496 Status: Offline

Not to pick nits, but it was an S-3 (although I thought the Navy had retired all of 'em last year. Go fig).

RE: their Vipers: Not sure if you'd call 'em "pristine" but if spares are becoming harder to come by then one would think they'd dial the training intensity back in order to save airframe life and keep from havin' a accident and losin' a couple. And we all know that if you don't push the envelope in training, you lose your edge when the curtain goes up.

Read somethin' somewhere a day or so before that article that said some of their newer Russian stuff were crankin' engines when the incursion was "defused".

Yeah they are flying SU-30's now. Chavez also threatened to sell his F-16's to iran. Whoopdeedoo give iran more aircraft that arent worth a crap anymore....

But isn't this what the Tu-95s do all the time to us? And don't we interecept?

Elite Joined: Jan 31, 2004 Posts: 1496 Status: Offline

Of course. But we don't make near as big a stink about it as Uncle Hugo needs to. And he needs to to make him appear to be "El Presidente Valiente Grande" standin' up to "El Diablo Grande del Norte".

I flew those FAV F-16s in 1989 while on a 2-week tour to introduce the AIM-9L. The jets were well maintained at that time. The FAV F-16s have since participated in Red Flag out at Nellis. I know that they have lost a couple of them. One was during an airshow practice, and I believe another was lost due to a birdstike while on a low-level.

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Venezuelan F-16's ??