Red Stripe Hornets |
Naval Air Systems Command grounded 104 Navy and Marine F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets Friday after inspectors discovered the airframes were developing cracks much earlier than engineers had thought.
The grounding order affects the first four varieties of Hornet — models A through D — and does not apply to aircraft now flying combat missions over Iraq or Afghanistan. The number of Hornets affected makes up 16 percent of the Navy-Marine A through D fleet.
-(Navy Times 14 Mar)
Looks like NAVAIR is taking a big cut into the stable of Hornets out there in the fleet. This will have impact across the fleet, and force a hard decision on leadership to fix the jets and cut back on JSF, or hope that we can rely on the rollout of JSF.



Tough decision for NAVAIR. JSF will be nice when it finally gets here, but waiting to back fill all of those Hornets will mean a long gap in numbers of platforms.