To save millions, military grounds planes worth billions

WASHINGTON — The Air Force has grounded a big portion of its newly refurbished, multibillion-dollar fleet of C-5 Galaxy transport planes, just to avoid spending the relatively small amount of money it costs to fly them.

In order to save $60 million in annual operating costs, the Air Force has since fiscal 2015 placed eight of its top-of-the-line C-5s in “backup aircraft inventory” status, even though they are needed to ferry troops and gear around the world, said Gen. Carlton Everhart, the four-star chief of Air Mobility Command.

The gargantuan planes, among the largest on the planet, “sit on the ramp” at two Air Force bases, one in California and the other in Delaware, Everhart said in an interview. The eight planes in the backup inventory have not flown for nearly three years — even though they collectively cost more than $2 billion.

When the eight planes that have been grounded to save money are combined with four more kept in reserve for emergencies under standard procedures, that means nearly a quarter of the latest C-5 aircraft, the M models, are out of service.

Everhart said it was a “budget decision” to ground the eight extra planes, and he hopes the funding will be restored soon to bring them back into the active fleet. “It’s not the most perfect system,” he said of the Pentagon budgeting process.

Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said “the Air Force has the economics upside down here. If they can truly get by on 75 percent of the fleet, why did the taxpayer spend billions of dollars on excess capacity? We’re all for cutting costs, but do it in a smart way, starting with reducing the F-35 buy, or better yet, buy more F-16s instead to bridge the technological gap to more capable UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). Or close some of that excess base capacity.”