Thursday, December 20, 2007
C141 Starlifter vs C17!
Thanks to one of our readers who pointed out my 'deliberate' mistake regarding a c141 starlifter which of course in now retired! Actually the aircraft I saw was longer than the C17 so I have to assume it was probably a C5 Galaxy rather than a C17. Most often, they are actually C17's but I believe there are still C5's in service.
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2 comments:
Actually, there are over 100 C5B's still in service and there is a 17 billion dollar upgrade program in the works. Of course the Air Force wants all new planes so they're saying things about the C5s that are, apparently not true.
The C5, as far as I know carries about as much as the C17 weight wise but is a much larger aircraft (about 30%) so it can carry more volume.
I think the best option would be to upgrade 50-75 of the best C5 airframes to C5C versions and get a total of 250-300 C17s. We need more airlift capacity badly but since they're not flashy fighters or expensive bombers the airforce puts them on the back burner.
I'm the above poster. Went to a few sites to check out the C5/C17 specs and the C17 is quite a bit smaller (100ft shorter basically) and carries about 100,000lbs less in weight.
Therefore, maybe keep all the C5B's and upgrade them with digital flight controls, lose a few tons of control wires ;-)
We can still use a good number of C17s but since more C5's would be helpful, lets cut my 300 to 250 max ;-)
Sorry for the misinformation in my first post.
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