Jarlaxle wrote: Bullshit. The Air Force is still flying B-52s that were built in the Eisenhower administration! The newest A-10 was built in 1984. Most B-1s are over 25 years old. The A-1 Skyraider was in service 30 years.
Apples to orangutans. None of the planes you list are carrier based aircraft. The plane I was talking about- the A-6 Intruder- was carrier based. And most would be pushing 45 years old now, with only a few of the 170 built in the 20-30 year old range. It's the cat shots and the wire traps that wear out Navy birds far faster than an Air Force plane. It's a lot easier to rebuild a big Air Force bomber like the B52 when you don't have to replace the entire airframe. The Navy had bought a bunch of spare wing assemblies for the A-6 (most of which went to waste, though some were repurposed to keep the EA-6B fleet going post-production) but that didn't do anything to address main fuselage fatigue. Note that the Navy has already completely phased out the F-14, built at the same time as the F-15 which the Air Force still uses. And the Navy is already replacing early model F/A-18 Hornets with Super Hornets (which are not really the same plane, they just look similar) though the bulk is supposed to be replaced by F35s. The Navy has put a lifespan on the F/A-18 at under 100,000 flight hours, which quite a few have already gotten near.
The Air Force has attempted to replace the B-52 multiple times- first with the B-70 Valkyrie, mostly due to cost, then the B-1, due to unreliability, and the B-2, again due to cost. Originally the Air Force only envisioned a 10-15 year airframe life for the B-52, and the B and C models were retired right on schedule. At the time, new designs were getting put into production about every 5 years. That ended with the B-52. They had no new bird to replace the retiring ones. Since they'd built a huge number of G and H models, that didn't matter much in the 1960s, but now with less than 100 H models left (all the others having been scrapped) and STILL no viable replacement, it's just old hat to keep refurbishing them. Been doing so since the 1970s, when the NEWEST B-52 had reached their intended design life end.
The B-1B is another story. It's construction pretty much precludes the massive rebuilds that the B-52 has undergone (well, you could do it, be very expensive), and they'll leave service long before the last B-52 is retired. Hell, I expect the B52 will long outlive the B-2, for the same reason, though the Air Force says otherwise. In both cases, though, the planes were designed for much longer lifespans than the B-52s original 10-15 year one. Plus they've flown fewer missions than planes did back in Vietnam. The B-1B's only real advantage nowadays is that it's the least expensive, in terms of dollars per flight hours, of any of the 3 large bombers. But it's still a very maintenance intensive aircraft.
The A-10 is a good plane and there is no REAL reason to retire it except to free up budget for the F35 which can't do the A-10's job half as well as the A-10 can. It's just that the F35 can do several other jobs "adequately" (so they say) and the Military's bean counters say one plane doing 3 jobs is better than 3 planes doing one job each.
As for the A-1, I can't really say why a piston prop plane lasted so long into the jet age except that no suitable replacement had been built. It was a stout bird with good survivability. The Navy replaced it with the A-6, but it took a while to build up enough inventory. The newest airframes were only 16 years old when the US retired them, and Gabon retired them finally in 1985. But heck, the Dominican Air Force kept the P-51 Mustang in service until 1984.
