F-15 Fighter Jet Breaks In Half in Sky

F-15 fighter jets of the U.S. Air Force partially resumed flights from Kadena Air Base on the Japanese island of Okinawa on Monday. According to Japanese press, 39 out of 55 U.S. F-15 fighter jets of the air base were allowed to resume flight, and the other 16 will remain grounded for further inspections.

The decision came more than two months after all F-15 series jets were grounded on Nov. 2, last year, when an F-15 jet crashed in Missouri, United States.

Prior to the announcement of the decision, the U.S. Air Force released the result of its investigation on the accident last Thursday. After revealing a shocking video in which the fighter jet broke in half mid-air all of a sudden, it confirmed that among 450 old F-15 models (from type A to D) owned by the U.S. Air Force, 162 units or 40 percent of the total have flaws in the fuselage. Some of them had metal beams, which support the fuselage, with cracks on them, and some others had wrong specifications.

The aging of F-15 series fighter jets, which have been placed in commission since 1972, is to largely account for the dismaying discovery. Those that have been confirmed with flaws were produced by McDonnell Douglas between 1978 and 1985. The one that crashed was also manufactured in 1980.

While the fighter jets were grounded for the last two months, the United States had to go through a great deal of trouble in managing its combat power. It had to rely on CF-18 fighter jets from the Canadian Air Force for guarding its Alaska airspace where Russian bombing planes often made an appearance, and it was no longer able to continue its raiding operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In particular, given how F-15s, which account for 20 percent of U.S. air power, undertake most of the home defense, it will be a matter of time before a security vacuum is formed in the U.S. airspace if the flight of 162 fighter jets continues to be banned. The figure is much higher than the combined number of F-15 series owned and employed by the Korean and the Japanese Air Forces.

Since most of F-16 fighter jets, a viable replacement for F-15s, are currently dispatched overseas, it is hard to fill the vacuum in the U.S. home defense for the time being. Although the U.S. Air Force began to replace old F-15 fighter jets with new F-22 Raptors, it is making a slow progress as the price of the new jets reach a staggering 132 million dollars (around 123.7 billion won).

zsh75@donga.com