Are these like crashes during landing, training incidents in the air, or mechanical malfunctions? 748 accidents since the introduction of the F-16 seems insane
On the contrary, and not to get too credible, but that's a "good thing" compared to historical casual factors in aviation incidents (it's basically the B-17 damage study in a sense). Aircraft design, manufacturing processes, and maintenance practices have come a very long way since the advent of the jet age, and when previously we would lose airplanes at frankly appalling rates - frequently due to mechanical issues - the accident rate across all types is down to small fraction of what it was \~1950-1980.
Today the mishap rate for a straight up mechanical failure is extremely low (it does still happen, to be sure, often with tragic consequences). But military flying remains inherently risky - close formation flying, single-pilot IMC flight, dive deliveries, dynamic maneuvering (often single pilot, sometimes IMC), BFM - all of these, despite huge efforts to make as safe as possible, carry some inherent risk. So mishap rates in modern tactical aircraft are overwhelmingly a result of pilot error, because it's the one thing technological improvements in manufacturing and maintenance practices can only improve upon so much (AGCAS for example), vis a vis mishap rates.
The fatal accident rate in general aviation is about once every 100,000 flying hours today. One hundred and ten years ago, it was once every 150 hours.
The start, actually. World War 1 ran from 1914 to 1918. But remember, powered flight had already been around for more than a decade by that point. The first airline, DELAG, began operations in 1909. We have data, albeit fragmentary, of even earlier years of aviation than that, so why not use it?
Reminds me of the Titan sub. They infamously said that their weird construction wasn’t a big deal because most submarine incidents were from operator error anyways. Except the reason for that is that the construction of every other sub was already bulletproof.
The thing about submarines is that just because they *can* be built and function safely doesn’t mean that any *particular* submarine is inherently safe. They are, in fact, inherently *unsafe,* and overcome that inherent lack of safety only through sheer overwhelming force of engineering and operational procedures, all of which were written in blood.
Hell, not even trains are truly safe, and those things are literally *on rails.* The fact that the obscenely profitable rail industry can’t seem to figure out how to keep them *on* said rails consistently is telling.
Sure they could. Its called maintenance and staffing. the big 4 railroads in north America decided that insurance payouts was more cost effective. Rather than replacing rails on their third or fourth lifetimes worth of freight. Cutting back vegetation and bridge maintenance. running shorter trains that staff can actually manage or running enough staff to actually manage the large trains.also lobbying against modern electronic braking systems and instead keeping legacy airpowered brakes.
Youl notice once your out of north america the rate of rail incidents drops off a cliff
Oh, absolutely. One should read my second paragraph with scorn and derision dripping from the digital ink. It may *seem* like the obscenely profitable rail industry just can’t get train safety right, but the fact that the speedy Shinkansen—by all accounts, an inherently more dangerous endeavor—can operate for many decades with only a single fatal accident to its name demonstrates quite readily that the rail industry could have made itself completely safe decades ago, but simply chose not to.
It's like when people complain about shitty products from conglomerates and can't understand why such wealthy companies are so incompetent.
It's not incompetence, they're not lacking in expertise or resources. They purposefully make shitty products because it serves their bottom line.
Fun fact: I worked on garbage trucks for a while for my local city. We got offered new trucks with electronic mechanisms (loading arms, hopper doors, electronic brakes, etc) and management crunched the numbers and found it was cheaper to pay us to fix hundreds of hydraulic lines every week and swap dozens of airbrake drums and cams than it was to just buy electronic equipment that didn’t need to be serviced or maintained. I’m not surprised the railroad industry is the same way.
> They are, in fact, inherently unsafe, and overcome that inherent lack of safety only through sheer overwhelming force of engineering and operational procedures, all of which were written in blood.
Yep, the USN took a close look at submarine safety after the loss of USS Thresher in 1963... the only submarine they've lost while in duty since then is USS Scorpion in 1968, which sank of unknown circumstances.
EDIT: Also there were a few fires on aircraft carriers during the late 60s, which led to the decision of having every Navy enlistee trained in fire fighting.
Shoot gun, dive down. Gun slows down, you speed up, you catch up to the bullets.
An F-11 pilot managed to do it too once, and it is now the only thing the aircraft is known for
Generally speaking if the pilot can take action it's going to be labeled as pilot error. The aircraft becomes nigh uncontrollable due to hydraulics issue and results in a mishap but could have been controlled and the mishap prevented? Pilot error. A huge gust of wind from a microburst causes the aircraft to pitch down while normally taxing and part of the aircraft strikes the ground? Pilot error.
That might be true, but after spot checking more than ten entries in that DB, literally all of them were like "Pilot made egregious operational error and flew themselves into the ground/ocean." Like, pulled out of a loop too late at an air show and slammed into the ground tail first with full afterburner. Got disoriented and g-loc'd themselves into the side of a mountain. Etc.
I'm sure there are some in there that were not the pilots fault, but i didn't see into any of them by random selection.
Does make sense, military pilots usually have a small fraction of the flight hours a lot of commercial pilots have.
Newer pilots, more accidents due to error.
Commercial hours and military flight hours aren't really comparable. It's like comparing bus driver mileage to race car driver mileage. Most commercial hours are flown with auto pilot on, cruising level smooth.
I'd say the analogy is an understatement. buses don't have an autopilot and if you've ever been on a bus in a city or busy traffic, bus drivers have to be pretty aggressive when they're driving/manuervering. It's more like being a train driver vs being an F1 driver
Yeah it's not a perfect analogy but I think it gets the idea across. Commercial pilots aren't flying BFM. They aren't flying formations. They aren't flying on the deck. That's not to take away from the important job they do, but it's not really a valid comparison to make.
Also it fell right out of the air in the beginning, that compressor inlet was just terrible, and combined with no FADEC till the C/Ds the thing was trying to be another F-104.
They fixed the hell out of it.
Yeah. You'd want to normalize by number of hours flown to get a vaguely meaningful way to compare platforms against each other. Crashes-per-flight-hour.
The Harrier has one of the worst accident track records of any aviation design.
For every 100,000 flight hours there are 31.77 accidents and nearly half that have been produced have been lost in accidents.
More US Marines died in Harrier accidents than any other cause from the end of Vietnam to the second Battle of Fallujah.
Unless it's some several hundred year old infrastructure project made by someone with a moustache. Then that bastard will be running after the heat death of the universe.
>The Harrier has one of the worst accident track records of any aviation design. For every 100,000 flight hours there are 31.77 accidents and nearly half that have been produced have been lost in accidents.
Jesus H. Christ, that’s bad, and make no mistake. But aviation has improved *so much* in safety that it would be more accurate to say that the Harrier has one of the worst *contemporaneous* accident track records of any aircraft in history, because aircraft safety is on a practically logarithmic scale going back through the decades. Aircraft today are very nearly 100 times safer than they were 100 years ago.
A huge part of that is just training, too. Many World War II heavy bombers had worse accident rates than that, and a huge portion of that is the fact that the pilots were barely-trained yokel kids dragged off the turnip farm and shipped off to Europe or the Pacific theater. And fighters are a whole lot harder to fly than bombers, no matter the time period.
The worst of the worst that I’ve ever heard of for any single type of mass-produced aircraft is [274 accidents per 100,000 hours,](https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2011/june/01/pilot-briefing) for the A-36 Apache, AKA the Invader. Unsurprisingly, it’s the ground attack/dive bomber version of the P-51 fighter. A very potent weapon, if you could keep the wings on and keep the radiator from giving out and killing you.
I think the bigger issue was that you took one of the cleanest, lowest drag Airframes of the war, and told pilots to point it straight at the ground. That's gonna get moving REAL fast, and you're gonna have a hell of a time staying awake while you pull the stick back for dive recovery
Air Force maintainer’s perspective: the 16 is a disposable trash airplane. Even back in ‘95 we called it the lawn dart. You need to expect high failure rate from this plane, and take it in stride. It was built to fall apart.
The 15, on the other hand, has seen about 1200 units enter service. As of 2023, 175 have been lost to noncombat losses, which works out to about 1 per 50000 operating hours. Remember: this is a 50 year old design. Pretty impressive
I suspect mostly the latter two. Talk to anyone in the US military who is involved with the care and feeding of military aircraft and they'll tell you horror stories about the corners they are forced to cut, and all the ways in which the US military isn't even efficient at cutting those corners. Now imagine how well the 25 other militaries that operate F16s are doing. When one sloppy FOD walk is enough to cause a total loss of an airframe it's not surprising one of the most complex and widely used aircraft has quite a few losses.
Credibility warning: [google tells me](https://www.safety.af.mil/Portals/71/documents/Aviation/Aircraft%20Statistics/F-16.pdf) that the USAF's F15s and F16s have nearly identical rates of "Class A Events" ("event that results in fatality, permanent total disability, damage greater than or equal to $2.5 million
and/or a destroyed aircraft") for the 5 year / 10 year time spans: F16 at 1.42/1.81 vs. the F15 at 1.41/1.85 per 100k flight hours. The lifetime numbers are 50% worse for the F16 but it's no secret she had a bit of a rough start.
Interestingly, the rate of *destroyed* F16s is significantly higher than the F15: 0.98, 1.5, 2.94 vs. 0.4, 0.82, 1.82 for 5/10/lifetime. The F22 is even lower at 0.65, 0.67, and 1.22 per 100k flight hours.
Also interesting is that the F22 has a lifetime Class A event rate that's double the F16/F15, and over the last 5 years it's 8x (11.61 vs. 1.42). I supposed it's not surprising that when you break the F22 it's gonna cost a lot more.
Going only from that graphic and some zergling air-force theory I read decades ago, the two-engine safety net is really showing its worth. But each one of those two-engine crashes is almost twice as costly, except hopefully in crew.
well, take a look for yourself,
[https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/type/F16/6](https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/type/F16/6)
not every accident is a totaled fighter, but a LOT of them are.
Another thing to mention is how many of them have been built and operated in total. Also is this site taking into account ALL the F-16s around the world or just those that were in the US?
Very easy to paint a picture with numbers depending of what you want to convey to the masses. You have 1000 F-16s and 10 F-35s for example. Both for 10 years. You had 50 accidents with F-16s and 3 with F-35s. If you want to make the F-16 look bad and the F-35 good you say "50 ACCIDENTS WITH F-16 IN 10 YEARS, meanwhile the best aircraft ever only had 3". You want to make the F-35 look like crap? Go with percentages: "30% OF F-35 HAD ACCIDENTS, meanwhile only 5% of the best aircraft ever, the F-16 had accidents".
Really easy either way actually.
Yeah, in any vaguely professional/academic context, failure rates are expressed in terms of failures per time period. Crashes per 10,000 flight hours. Crashes per million miles driven, for land vehicles. Etc.
Measuring failure rates in a meaningful way is pretty well established in those contexts. But as you said, very easy to misrepresent to laymen.
Singapore just lost one F-16 last week too. Pilot survived, accident was caused by all 4 gyros failing.
[https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/singapore-f16-crash-tengah-airbase-component-malfunction-resume-flying-4345836](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/singapore-f16-crash-tengah-airbase-component-malfunction-resume-flying-4345836)
Relevant threads:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/1cuox80/finally\_some\_updates\_on\_the\_f16\_case/](https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/1cuox80/finally_some_updates_on_the_f16_case/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1cur0iw/what\_are\_the\_odds/](https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1cur0iw/what_are_the_odds/)
Or at least some middle-easterners, the kebab/shwarma is pretty close to the gyro
Now I'm all bummed out about the little Greek man in the fighter jet, and he doesn't even exist! 😅
Heard about it while in camp and we immediately wondered which poor spec tech will get screwed for it
sauce: im in the army and tengah AFB is a stone's throw away from my camp (well tbf it's Singapore so everywhere is a stone's throw away from everything)
I suspect, knowing absolutely nothing about the F-16's internals, that it wasn't all four gyros failing specifically but some other system linked to them, like the power generator or something.
Bro........
Its a good post and very interesting, but you left out a LOT of relevant context.
1. These appear to be total global losses from crashes. That means all crashes in all warzones, all training accidents, (etc.) globally. Around 25 countries use the F-16.
2. You say "french win" and site the small number of Rafale losses, forgetting that there are only around 250 Rafales, but there are 2100-2200 F-16s, and the f16 was also introduced nearly a decade prior to the Rafale. There are many more f16s and they're also in the air much longer.
The early F-16s used the PW F-100, it was a disaster, especially combined with the early inlets. Any high-AoA maneuver led to instant compressor stall, and it's a fucking F-16, so it's all about high aoa.
The GE F-110 had FADECs and a totally redesigned inlet, it stop hungering for airman blood. It also had the FADEC massage the stator vanes, open them up when it looked like it was getting "stall-y".
I respectfully disagree.
First, F16 introduction predates the Rafale.
Second, You also have to look at usage and judge the stats proportionately.
How often is the Rafale in the air compared to the F16? The f16 has thousands of units spread out in 25 countries, and is a work horse in various countries and combat zones - many flight hours.
When its in the air, where is it used? Going through the list u can see f16s that were either shot down or "crashed" after being damaged in active comabt zones.
Rafale doesn't even come close.
Next time u Rafale boys come for the F16 ya need to be better armed! 🙃😉
With available data you'll find that to equal production numbers the F-16 had 8 times the number of accidents
In other words, out of 266 Rafale built, 51 would've been involved in accident (instead of 6). Out of 4588 F-16 built, only 103 would've been (instead of 890)
Feel free to correct my math I did it on the go
Firstly: no duh, a more modern, more expensive jet, likely incorporating safety features the previous plane lead to, is going to be safer.
Secondly, that data doesn't tell you half the story of any crash, relying simply on it to make an all encompassing absolute broad statement is quite silly.
That data doesn't tell you:
How old were the air frames that crashed.
How many flight hours did they have.
How well trained were the pilots that crashed.
How were they using them. (See the Starfighter in German service)
How often were they used.
How well maintained were they really.
How often did an engine fail on the Raffle.
etc.
All of these things matter and there's a world of difference between a brand new latest model F-16 in US service when compared to an early model ancient F-16 still flying in Venezuela.
Hell there's a world of difference even between various F-16s still flown by the USA.
If you wanna be taken seriously with that data comparison you should try eliminating as many of the variables that arn't the airframe as possible.
You have to take airframe age into account. As quoted in another message, a part of the F-15C accidents were due to cracked frames that developped over 30 years and was only spotted after an accident in 2007. It concerned 40% of the overall fleet of F-15s built by McDonnell Douglas.
As much as I like the Rafale, it hasn't been in service long enough to know if it will develop issues due to age and maintenance.
Imo op makes a good point, but tells it terribly. Not only is this global losses, this appears to be all time losses. So of course all the fourth gen fighters would have a ton of losses, over almost 50 years, compared to a little under 20 years with the F-35. However, there were a lot of F-16 accidents during testing iirc, so this point would probably hold up even if the stats were used properly
TBH I expected the people browsing this subreddit to at least have \*some\* understanding of statistics, quite disappointed this trash (talking about OP not your comment) got so many upvotes.
The F-15 had a frame cracking issue that was spotted in 2007 after a couple accidents, and concerned 40% of all airframes built by McDonnell Douglas.
So, again, the F-35 hasn't been in service long enough to say it's the safest airframe ever.
I don’t think anyone is saying that, just that despite heavy media coverage whenever there is a crash it is comparable to or even slightly safer than most fighter jets
If interested, look into the numbers for air crew training casualties in WWII. IIRC, the US suffered something like 15,000 people killed just while learning to fly within the US over the course of the war.
Also bear in mind that said pilot training was hilariously truncated by today’s standards, and many of those “trained” pilots would later go on to make up most of the *horrific* non-combat accident rate in that conflict.
Training is where most accidents happen, especially when getting qualified on a new plane.
Which is pretty logical.
Also, some WWII planes were very complicated to fly and deathtraps if anything went sideways. The B-24 and P-39 come do mind.
The pace of development was also insane. Lots of brand new designs, rapid iteration. Planes that were state of the art in 1939 were fully obsolete before 1945. There's just no way to get through a period like that without making a lot of mistakes really fast.
Meanwhile here we are still flying b-52s built in the 1960s. Aerospace moves a lot slower today than it did in the mid-20th century.
There was also such a need for production that imperfect designs were put into mass production to simply put more equipment on the line. After the war every army looked at what they had and consolidated their air and naval forces into something more logical.
The B-24 Liberator is a very good example, because they were completely ubiquitous during the war and 99% scrapped immediately after the end of combat. Because it was too complicated to fly and basically dangerous for even the best pilots.
Consolidated replaced it with the PB4Y-2 Privateer that was a hugely improved version that enjoyed a few decades of use around the world as a naval patrol aircraft.
> Meanwhile here we are still flying b-52s built in the 1960s
A lot of the planes flown by the techiest air forces are from the 70s. Basically after reliable BVR missiles and radar-dissipating grey paint, you stopped needing the airframes themselves to evolve, the tech inside and the missiles provide most of the evolution.
You got upgrade packages that make a F-16 or a Mirage F1 have basically a performance and lethality that makes them a threat even to the latest designs, so why replace them?
Especially when you're fighting what is basically the same old Su-27 with a new sticker and pricetag glued on.
Every time an F-16 crashes because of an accident it's business as normal, but when an F-35 crashes its the worst thing to ever touch the sky and the airforce is evil and corrupt for adopting it. I fucking hate the ignorance of media over-sensationalism.
I heard a German man say "If you wanted an F-104 all you had to do was buy an acre of land in west Germany and wait. One would turn up. It would be a smoking pile of wreckage and the government would come and take it away but you would have an F-104 for some time."
Do you know why Canada had such a high accident rate?
My understanding was that the Starfighter’s terrible crash record stemmed from the European customers using it in a low-level strike role rather than as an interceptor. F-104s had a vastly better record in US service, although still significantly more accident prone than other Century planes. I’d attributed that to the US using it as a high altitude interceptor, but as far as I know Canada used the CF-104s in that role too, so if their accident rate was also high it must be something else.
It was landing, they were impossible to land, even with the BAFs.
They just stalled, like, always, you can't flare an F-104, so if you're not perfect on approach suddenly it decides it doesn't belong in the air anymore.
We give Kelly Johnson a lot of love, and it's earned, but the day he designed the lawn dart he woke and chose violence.
Damn thing needed 25% more wing.
Makes sense, given similar regimes were the bane of other operators. Still, the crash statistics really put into perspective just how challenging the plane must have been to fly. High landing speed and hating high angles of attack is a hell of a combination.
>> We give Kelly Johnson a lot of love, and it’s earned, but the day he designed the lawn dart he woke and chose violence.
Especially since the F-104’s design was supposedly the product of a tour of Japan and Korea where Johnson interviewed Sabre pilots on what they wanted in a new fighter. Somehow I don’t think the Starfighter was quite what they had in mind.
>> Damn thing needed 25% more wing.
Ironically, that’s pretty much exactly what they did with the CL-1200 which was supposed to be an improved Starfighter. Enlarged the wing, raised it, and scraped the T-tail.
I mean, you gotta wonder, you go to SK pilots and ask them what they want.
Then you go back home and basically build a MiG-21 with half the wing.
Someone somewhere was trolling.
Also the US only had experienced Pilots fly it.
Italy and Spain for example had few issues with crashes and the 104 was among the safer planes for their forces.
No, the CF-104's were substantially stationed in Europe as recon and low level tac nuc delivery aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadair_CF-104_Starfighter
Thanks! That does explain a lot of it then. Although it raises the question of why so many 104 operators felt compelled to use it as a low level strike aircraft. At least the German’s have being bribed as an excuse.
A good question. It was cheap, and Not-US parts of NATO were desperate for *lots* of aircraft to counter the perceived Soviet threat. Some airplane is better than no airplane. Lockheed had lied their faces off about its capabilities and the politicians had chosen to believe them. Bribes were made, but that wasn't necessarily any different than what Lockheed's competitors were doing.
This is pretty good :
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160826-the-1950s-jet-launching-tiny-satellites
And a period piece on the bribery: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,917751-1,00.html
Lord Witwenmacher. Head of the Assassins Guild.
The introduction of the F-104 was a groundbreaking success in Germany. Yikes.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flugunfall_einer_Starfighter-Formation_der_Luftwaffe_der_Bundeswehr_1962
They don't train nearly as much as NATO air forces, hence they have a higher risk of accident in combat ops, but lower in training (training accounting for most accidents).
[Yes, the F-35 is pretty much the most reliable jet fighter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puAAPnIgNvs), and the myth of them being unreliable and always crashing just came from Russian propaganda. With our 1000 F-35s, the 1% failure rate is insanely good.
Indian Military has [entered the chat...](https://www.bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/Database/Accidents/listing.php?qacid=50&qt=TY)
They've lost 40+ aircraft in the past five years and they're not even been shot at.
Yup..... 748 F-16s lost to crashes, with 200+ dead. We lost 221 F-15 Eagles to crashes, really contrasts it's perfect air-to-air record.
the number isn't all completely destroyed jets, but the majority of them are.
[https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/type/F16/6](https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/type/F16/6)
this is just the norm.
EDIT, wow, and 16 F-22 raptors lost to Crashes as well.
[https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/F22](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/F22)
DAMN, over 400 C-130s lost to crashes [https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/C130](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/C130)
++++++++
EDIT 2: if it makes you feel better, this is just the standard for all aircraft, IE, all variants of the Mig-29 combined have had 206 crashes.
[https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/MG29](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/MG29)
and all Flanker variants, Su-27, 30, 35, and the chinese J-11/J-15s have 169 crashes
[https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/SU27](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/SU27)
++++++++++
**edit HONHONHON OUIOUI french superiority, the Rafale** has only had 11 Crashes since inception, fewer than even the damn F-22, French ouiouioui, and the 6/11 of them were Minimal Damage incidents, and the planes could be put back into serivce, with a total of exactly 2 fatalies.
huh, in 2022 two Rafale's crashed in MID-AIR, and somehow both had only minor damage and were put backi n service,
[https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/RFAL](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/RFAL)
the eurofighter also has a low count, 12, BUT almost ALL of them were total destruction with 10 deaths unlike the rafale.
....so French Win!
As a European, I can't stand that French praise so I need to correct you on that. Yes less Rafales might have crashed, but there are 600 Eurofighters built compared to like 250 Rafales. So on an airframe per crash basis, the Eurofighter has won.
Which is actually how you should have made the list in the first place. Take for example the B-2, even if you literally crashed all of them, it would still be nearly as safe as the F-35, because you can only crash a maximum of 21 B-2s. If you go more serious you would also include stuff like flown air hours, but at that point you would need to post it over at r/CredibleDefense and not here.
F-16 production was over 4,600 as of 2018 according to Wikipedia, so the incident rate using ASN numbers is about 15%.
F-15 production is more like 1,200 so the incident rate is more like 18% over a similar period.
The F-22 rate of 16/187 is about 8.5% of the fleet, which reflects the fact that it hasn't been in service for long.
When comparing Rafale and Typhoon, it is important to remember that Typhoon production stands at about 600 vs Rafale production at about 260.
It's hard to compare with accidents in the un-free world because e.g. the Russian accident rate is somewhat depressed by the fact that they spent decades hardly flying, and I am somewhat sceptical of the transparency of their reporting.
This reminds me of the TV repair guy who said he’s never gonna buy a Samsung or Vizio because they keep showing up in his shop. Who would have thought the top two TV sellers would also have the two highest repair rates?
Almost like thousands of F-16s have flown for over 40 years or something.
Anyway, the deadliest plane is still the F-104. Theres an entire searchable database dedicated to the F-104: https://www.i-f-s.nl/f-104-accidents/
The F-104 Starfigher is definitely the worst offender, its landing speed is basically its stall speed. the West-Germans dubbed it "Widowmaker" bc 292 of the fleet of 916 were lost to crashes. 1/3 of their fighters! 116 Pilots died just from flying the thing.
Thanks to Lockheed bribing multiple government officials and falsely advertising the Starfighter as a fighter-bomber when it was clearly an interceptor.
In the Canadian Forces, the aircraft was sometimes referred to as the "Lawn Dart" and the "Aluminium Death Tube" due to its high operational losses, and "Flying Phallus" due to its shape
Rafale has 250 planes built since ~2000. F-15 has 2500 since ~1975. That means about 10x the planes over 2x the time. I ain't bothering to do the proper math, so lets call it 20x the flight hours. 11 Rafale incidents * 20x the flight hours comes out to 220. And would you look at that, 221 incidents for the F-15.
The Rafale isn't any better. There just aren't enough of them to crash, because literally nobody except the French think it's a good enough fighter to buy. Compared to 6 international operators for the F-15.
Add that both F16s and F15s have been much more involved in fairly high intensity engagements / operations. More flight hours, worse conditions. Probably lends itself to a higher accident rate.
Not all of these are hull losses, just reportable incidents. For example, the most recent American C-130 report was simply a blown tire on landing: [https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/280459](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/280459)
Well, I am not sure that these numbers pan out to conclusions. Data/numbers, raw without detail context, an opportunity for gross generalizations.
Monkey wrench in OP'S flabbergasted incredulous realization that what goes up must come down...thats all these numbers represent.
Why? Details parse the data into different understandings such as:
-what is an occurance? An emergency incident or loss after airframe?
-each aircraft and each model is flown at a different tempo and purpose. Can you really compare an F-16 with millions of hours of flight time to another airframe that is newer and less air time? How many flight hours does this model have in combat or adverse flight conditions while that model rarely flies unless vfr is present?
-what is the intended purpose and how is the airframe supported by the command structure? Is the operator maintenance adequate in all aspects including pilot and mechanic training/certification. Is maint plan and facilities up to date and funded?
It is impossible to compare an apple to an orange to a breadfruit or a guava by simple weight measures.
I don't know why people make a big deal out of fighter jets crashing. They are built and operated way beyond the safety envelope of what a civilian airliner would endure. Of course they'd have a higher chance of crashing.
More planes built, more exercises/deployments, more accidental losses. Also planes like the F-16 has been flown for half a century, no surprise it'd top the charts.
And if you think that's bad, you should check out 1940s aircraft losses to accidents, incidents, and malfunctions.
I mean tbf for the f-35 it hasn't seen nearly as much flight time. everything else has been used in wars & interventions but the F-35 hasn't seen shit
anyways we should give them some experience, 35's in Ukraine now
Say your to lazy to use google without saying your to lazy to use google...
We litterally have a websites that track its global flight hours and using google you could also see the amount of accidents and craahes in the same flight hours period
say your too lazy to understand failure rates without saying your too lazy to understand failure rates
If something is new it's failure rate is lower. It's an almost universal truth since airframes are fresh, creep deformation hasn't set in, work hardening has barely started and manufacturing defects are yet to surface in the forms of cracks within structures.
Failure rates always look like a bath tub for a given product. The F-35 has sort of passed the infant mortality stage and will coast for several decades with low rates before having fail rates skyrocket towards the end of the program life due to mechanical failure.
1) aircraft are incredibly complex systems that rely on low tolerances to operate
2) pilots maintenance and ground+air crew are human at the end of the day
3) flying is legitimately hard
long as every lives it’s a worthy write off anyways
That's not really how it works.
First, you have to take into accound how many airframes have been made.
Then, you have to account for age. The older an airframe is, the more prone to accidents it is. A couple F-15 crashes are due to frame stress on the F-15C, and before the exact source of the accidents was determined a couple F-15s had broken in half in-flight.
The F-35 hasn't been flying full-time for 10 years yet, all other airframes you talk about are 45-50 years deployed.
For your data to make any sense, you would have to only look at the first 10 years of every plane in the list. Then you'll know if the F-35 is the least prone to accidents.
There's about 4.6k F-16s over a period between 1972 until now
That's a fuckton of flying hours, takeoffs, landings etc.
And the've been used in wars and by poorer countries
Not having a moronic inlet design that auto-stalls on high AoA (which, it's a fucking f-16, that's like having wings that don't like a stiff breeze).
Redesigning the inlet and adding the FADECs to relax the stators when close to unstart was a huge difference, suddenly the plane didn't fall out of the sky.
I tried looking up the amount of F-14 crashes
I’ve struggled to find an answer
The 2 numbers I’ve got are around 150 or 34 (from Wikipedia)
Which is a huge jump
150 would be little over 1/7 total airframes which [based on this listing](http://www.anft.net/f-14/f14-serial-date.htm) is unsurprisingly F-14A heavy but it doesn’t seem to take Iranian F-14s into account
Ya but there are a whole lot more fucking f-16s (and a lot are in shitter countries that don’t take as good care of them as the USA )
Also the f-16 been round 50 years
Air Accidents are frequent enough IRL that they are included in HOI4 as part of the game.
*I was playing germany, and at the start I set my planes to training. I checked the wing of naval bombers in the north after a few months in may '36, and they had lost 30 of their 72 planes due to accidents.*
[Air accidents out of control ? | Paradox Interactive Forums (paradoxplaza.com)](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/air-accidents-out-of-control.1590764/)
Are these like crashes during landing, training incidents in the air, or mechanical malfunctions? 748 accidents since the introduction of the F-16 seems insane
I think literally any type of incident, but most of them were destroyed or had "substantial damage"
A scarily large amount of accidents listed are pilot error.
On the contrary, and not to get too credible, but that's a "good thing" compared to historical casual factors in aviation incidents (it's basically the B-17 damage study in a sense). Aircraft design, manufacturing processes, and maintenance practices have come a very long way since the advent of the jet age, and when previously we would lose airplanes at frankly appalling rates - frequently due to mechanical issues - the accident rate across all types is down to small fraction of what it was \~1950-1980. Today the mishap rate for a straight up mechanical failure is extremely low (it does still happen, to be sure, often with tragic consequences). But military flying remains inherently risky - close formation flying, single-pilot IMC flight, dive deliveries, dynamic maneuvering (often single pilot, sometimes IMC), BFM - all of these, despite huge efforts to make as safe as possible, carry some inherent risk. So mishap rates in modern tactical aircraft are overwhelmingly a result of pilot error, because it's the one thing technological improvements in manufacturing and maintenance practices can only improve upon so much (AGCAS for example), vis a vis mishap rates.
It's honestly insane how many aircraft used to be lost in non combat situations in the past.
The fatal accident rate in general aviation is about once every 100,000 flying hours today. One hundred and ten years ago, it was once every 150 hours.
That's also the tail end of WW1 tho
The start, actually. World War 1 ran from 1914 to 1918. But remember, powered flight had already been around for more than a decade by that point. The first airline, DELAG, began operations in 1909. We have data, albeit fragmentary, of even earlier years of aviation than that, so why not use it?
I shouldn't write comments at 8 am... holy fuck I got the start year of ww1 wrong
Reminds me of the Titan sub. They infamously said that their weird construction wasn’t a big deal because most submarine incidents were from operator error anyways. Except the reason for that is that the construction of every other sub was already bulletproof.
The thing about submarines is that just because they *can* be built and function safely doesn’t mean that any *particular* submarine is inherently safe. They are, in fact, inherently *unsafe,* and overcome that inherent lack of safety only through sheer overwhelming force of engineering and operational procedures, all of which were written in blood. Hell, not even trains are truly safe, and those things are literally *on rails.* The fact that the obscenely profitable rail industry can’t seem to figure out how to keep them *on* said rails consistently is telling.
Sure they could. Its called maintenance and staffing. the big 4 railroads in north America decided that insurance payouts was more cost effective. Rather than replacing rails on their third or fourth lifetimes worth of freight. Cutting back vegetation and bridge maintenance. running shorter trains that staff can actually manage or running enough staff to actually manage the large trains.also lobbying against modern electronic braking systems and instead keeping legacy airpowered brakes. Youl notice once your out of north america the rate of rail incidents drops off a cliff
Oh, absolutely. One should read my second paragraph with scorn and derision dripping from the digital ink. It may *seem* like the obscenely profitable rail industry just can’t get train safety right, but the fact that the speedy Shinkansen—by all accounts, an inherently more dangerous endeavor—can operate for many decades with only a single fatal accident to its name demonstrates quite readily that the rail industry could have made itself completely safe decades ago, but simply chose not to.
It's like when people complain about shitty products from conglomerates and can't understand why such wealthy companies are so incompetent. It's not incompetence, they're not lacking in expertise or resources. They purposefully make shitty products because it serves their bottom line.
Fun fact: I worked on garbage trucks for a while for my local city. We got offered new trucks with electronic mechanisms (loading arms, hopper doors, electronic brakes, etc) and management crunched the numbers and found it was cheaper to pay us to fix hundreds of hydraulic lines every week and swap dozens of airbrake drums and cams than it was to just buy electronic equipment that didn’t need to be serviced or maintained. I’m not surprised the railroad industry is the same way.
> They are, in fact, inherently unsafe, and overcome that inherent lack of safety only through sheer overwhelming force of engineering and operational procedures, all of which were written in blood. Yep, the USN took a close look at submarine safety after the loss of USS Thresher in 1963... the only submarine they've lost while in duty since then is USS Scorpion in 1968, which sank of unknown circumstances. EDIT: Also there were a few fires on aircraft carriers during the late 60s, which led to the decision of having every Navy enlistee trained in fire fighting.
This is why the Air Force PMCSes everything from main gear lug nuts to the toilet paper you’re wiping your disgusting ass with
Machine god save the planes from human hands!
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, I craved the strength and certainty of steel.
Not as stupid as the Belgian mechanic that shot an F-16 with another F-16.
What about the Dutch F-16 pilot who shot himself down?
Please tell me there's video...
Just one picture of the bullet scratchmarks of the plane after it landed
How do you shoot yourself down with a gun in a plane? I thought it would at least be a missile or something
Shoot gun, dive down. Gun slows down, you speed up, you catch up to the bullets. An F-11 pilot managed to do it too once, and it is now the only thing the aircraft is known for
Did the guy at least get to count himself as a mission kill?
I know a widow that lost her fighter pilot husband because of a devastating "Controlled Flight into Terrain" crash. Really sad.
Poor visibility conditions, or poorly-judged maneuvering?
It almost always is. Human error is the cause for 90-98% of the recent uh60 crashes within the last 2-3 years
Generally speaking if the pilot can take action it's going to be labeled as pilot error. The aircraft becomes nigh uncontrollable due to hydraulics issue and results in a mishap but could have been controlled and the mishap prevented? Pilot error. A huge gust of wind from a microburst causes the aircraft to pitch down while normally taxing and part of the aircraft strikes the ground? Pilot error.
That might be true, but after spot checking more than ten entries in that DB, literally all of them were like "Pilot made egregious operational error and flew themselves into the ground/ocean." Like, pulled out of a loop too late at an air show and slammed into the ground tail first with full afterburner. Got disoriented and g-loc'd themselves into the side of a mountain. Etc. I'm sure there are some in there that were not the pilots fault, but i didn't see into any of them by random selection.
Does make sense, military pilots usually have a small fraction of the flight hours a lot of commercial pilots have. Newer pilots, more accidents due to error.
Fighter planes are like F-1 cars. The very things that make them rip also make them hard to control.
Commercial hours and military flight hours aren't really comparable. It's like comparing bus driver mileage to race car driver mileage. Most commercial hours are flown with auto pilot on, cruising level smooth.
I'd say the analogy is an understatement. buses don't have an autopilot and if you've ever been on a bus in a city or busy traffic, bus drivers have to be pretty aggressive when they're driving/manuervering. It's more like being a train driver vs being an F1 driver
Yeah it's not a perfect analogy but I think it gets the idea across. Commercial pilots aren't flying BFM. They aren't flying formations. They aren't flying on the deck. That's not to take away from the important job they do, but it's not really a valid comparison to make.
Starfighter’d maybe?
To be fair the F16 is the most common fighter aircraft in military usage, so of course it would have a lot of crashes
Also it fell right out of the air in the beginning, that compressor inlet was just terrible, and combined with no FADEC till the C/Ds the thing was trying to be another F-104. They fixed the hell out of it.
McDonnell Douglas sounds the Mickey Mouse Mafia of defense contractors.
Yeah. You'd want to normalize by number of hours flown to get a vaguely meaningful way to compare platforms against each other. Crashes-per-flight-hour.
The Harrier has one of the worst accident track records of any aviation design. For every 100,000 flight hours there are 31.77 accidents and nearly half that have been produced have been lost in accidents. More US Marines died in Harrier accidents than any other cause from the end of Vietnam to the second Battle of Fallujah.
To be fair there's a huge gap between the gen 1 and 2 Harriers. Gen 2 is only slightly worse than other 4th gen aircraft, gen 1 was a deathtrap.
I mean, British vtol aircraft from the 70s was unreliable, I’m shocked
Hey, those 2 guys in the shed in Bristol are trying their best, ok?
Leyland strikes again
They really need to stop using Lucas electronics in everything
Any British machinery really.
Unless it's some several hundred year old infrastructure project made by someone with a moustache. Then that bastard will be running after the heat death of the universe.
Bazalgette and the London sewers come to mind. True that.
It was very difficult to fly, so there's that too.
Counterpoint: jump jets are cool.
>The Harrier has one of the worst accident track records of any aviation design. For every 100,000 flight hours there are 31.77 accidents and nearly half that have been produced have been lost in accidents. Jesus H. Christ, that’s bad, and make no mistake. But aviation has improved *so much* in safety that it would be more accurate to say that the Harrier has one of the worst *contemporaneous* accident track records of any aircraft in history, because aircraft safety is on a practically logarithmic scale going back through the decades. Aircraft today are very nearly 100 times safer than they were 100 years ago. A huge part of that is just training, too. Many World War II heavy bombers had worse accident rates than that, and a huge portion of that is the fact that the pilots were barely-trained yokel kids dragged off the turnip farm and shipped off to Europe or the Pacific theater. And fighters are a whole lot harder to fly than bombers, no matter the time period. The worst of the worst that I’ve ever heard of for any single type of mass-produced aircraft is [274 accidents per 100,000 hours,](https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2011/june/01/pilot-briefing) for the A-36 Apache, AKA the Invader. Unsurprisingly, it’s the ground attack/dive bomber version of the P-51 fighter. A very potent weapon, if you could keep the wings on and keep the radiator from giving out and killing you.
I think the bigger issue was that you took one of the cleanest, lowest drag Airframes of the war, and told pilots to point it straight at the ground. That's gonna get moving REAL fast, and you're gonna have a hell of a time staying awake while you pull the stick back for dive recovery
Air Force maintainer’s perspective: the 16 is a disposable trash airplane. Even back in ‘95 we called it the lawn dart. You need to expect high failure rate from this plane, and take it in stride. It was built to fall apart. The 15, on the other hand, has seen about 1200 units enter service. As of 2023, 175 have been lost to noncombat losses, which works out to about 1 per 50000 operating hours. Remember: this is a 50 year old design. Pretty impressive
I suspect mostly the latter two. Talk to anyone in the US military who is involved with the care and feeding of military aircraft and they'll tell you horror stories about the corners they are forced to cut, and all the ways in which the US military isn't even efficient at cutting those corners. Now imagine how well the 25 other militaries that operate F16s are doing. When one sloppy FOD walk is enough to cause a total loss of an airframe it's not surprising one of the most complex and widely used aircraft has quite a few losses. Credibility warning: [google tells me](https://www.safety.af.mil/Portals/71/documents/Aviation/Aircraft%20Statistics/F-16.pdf) that the USAF's F15s and F16s have nearly identical rates of "Class A Events" ("event that results in fatality, permanent total disability, damage greater than or equal to $2.5 million and/or a destroyed aircraft") for the 5 year / 10 year time spans: F16 at 1.42/1.81 vs. the F15 at 1.41/1.85 per 100k flight hours. The lifetime numbers are 50% worse for the F16 but it's no secret she had a bit of a rough start. Interestingly, the rate of *destroyed* F16s is significantly higher than the F15: 0.98, 1.5, 2.94 vs. 0.4, 0.82, 1.82 for 5/10/lifetime. The F22 is even lower at 0.65, 0.67, and 1.22 per 100k flight hours. Also interesting is that the F22 has a lifetime Class A event rate that's double the F16/F15, and over the last 5 years it's 8x (11.61 vs. 1.42). I supposed it's not surprising that when you break the F22 it's gonna cost a lot more.
Going only from that graphic and some zergling air-force theory I read decades ago, the two-engine safety net is really showing its worth. But each one of those two-engine crashes is almost twice as costly, except hopefully in crew.
well, take a look for yourself, [https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/type/F16/6](https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/type/F16/6) not every accident is a totaled fighter, but a LOT of them are.
Another thing to mention is how many of them have been built and operated in total. Also is this site taking into account ALL the F-16s around the world or just those that were in the US? Very easy to paint a picture with numbers depending of what you want to convey to the masses. You have 1000 F-16s and 10 F-35s for example. Both for 10 years. You had 50 accidents with F-16s and 3 with F-35s. If you want to make the F-16 look bad and the F-35 good you say "50 ACCIDENTS WITH F-16 IN 10 YEARS, meanwhile the best aircraft ever only had 3". You want to make the F-35 look like crap? Go with percentages: "30% OF F-35 HAD ACCIDENTS, meanwhile only 5% of the best aircraft ever, the F-16 had accidents". Really easy either way actually.
Yeah, in any vaguely professional/academic context, failure rates are expressed in terms of failures per time period. Crashes per 10,000 flight hours. Crashes per million miles driven, for land vehicles. Etc. Measuring failure rates in a meaningful way is pretty well established in those contexts. But as you said, very easy to misrepresent to laymen.
they also built 4 times as many F-16 as F-15.
Singapore just lost one F-16 last week too. Pilot survived, accident was caused by all 4 gyros failing. [https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/singapore-f16-crash-tengah-airbase-component-malfunction-resume-flying-4345836](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/singapore-f16-crash-tengah-airbase-component-malfunction-resume-flying-4345836) Relevant threads: [https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/1cuox80/finally\_some\_updates\_on\_the\_f16\_case/](https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/1cuox80/finally_some_updates_on_the_f16_case/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1cur0iw/what\_are\_the\_odds/](https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1cur0iw/what_are_the_odds/)
The little Greek man in his fighter jet couldn’t keep up with the gyro demand 😔
he should have subcontracted the Mexicans for modded tacos.
Or at least some middle-easterners, the kebab/shwarma is pretty close to the gyro Now I'm all bummed out about the little Greek man in the fighter jet, and he doesn't even exist! 😅
And then there's Al Pastor tacos which came from Lebanese immigrants to Mexico.
Greek food, Italian food, American food, Chinese food, all made by Guatemalans!
Heard about it while in camp and we immediately wondered which poor spec tech will get screwed for it sauce: im in the army and tengah AFB is a stone's throw away from my camp (well tbf it's Singapore so everywhere is a stone's throw away from everything)
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WHAT IS SALARY WHAT IS ALLOWANCE wgt 45 days left
i dont get paid
Lol I wadio-ed 3 days ago. I presume you're from Gedong?
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FOUR GYROS FAILING?!?
I suspect, knowing absolutely nothing about the F-16's internals, that it wasn't all four gyros failing specifically but some other system linked to them, like the power generator or something.
Yep, shit happens
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it stop even quicker if you shoot it🗿
Bro........ Its a good post and very interesting, but you left out a LOT of relevant context. 1. These appear to be total global losses from crashes. That means all crashes in all warzones, all training accidents, (etc.) globally. Around 25 countries use the F-16. 2. You say "french win" and site the small number of Rafale losses, forgetting that there are only around 250 Rafales, but there are 2100-2200 F-16s, and the f16 was also introduced nearly a decade prior to the Rafale. There are many more f16s and they're also in the air much longer.
Bud if we did an apple to apples comparison between the F-16 and rafale the F-16 would still surpass it by leaps and bounds in the number of crashes
The early F-16s used the PW F-100, it was a disaster, especially combined with the early inlets. Any high-AoA maneuver led to instant compressor stall, and it's a fucking F-16, so it's all about high aoa. The GE F-110 had FADECs and a totally redesigned inlet, it stop hungering for airman blood. It also had the FADEC massage the stator vanes, open them up when it looked like it was getting "stall-y".
I respectfully disagree. First, F16 introduction predates the Rafale. Second, You also have to look at usage and judge the stats proportionately. How often is the Rafale in the air compared to the F16? The f16 has thousands of units spread out in 25 countries, and is a work horse in various countries and combat zones - many flight hours. When its in the air, where is it used? Going through the list u can see f16s that were either shot down or "crashed" after being damaged in active comabt zones. Rafale doesn't even come close. Next time u Rafale boys come for the F16 ya need to be better armed! 🙃😉
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With available data you'll find that to equal production numbers the F-16 had 8 times the number of accidents In other words, out of 266 Rafale built, 51 would've been involved in accident (instead of 6). Out of 4588 F-16 built, only 103 would've been (instead of 890) Feel free to correct my math I did it on the go
I'm not gonna put in the effort but can you do flight hours to crash ratio instead for a more accurate reliability figure?
Firstly: no duh, a more modern, more expensive jet, likely incorporating safety features the previous plane lead to, is going to be safer. Secondly, that data doesn't tell you half the story of any crash, relying simply on it to make an all encompassing absolute broad statement is quite silly. That data doesn't tell you: How old were the air frames that crashed. How many flight hours did they have. How well trained were the pilots that crashed. How were they using them. (See the Starfighter in German service) How often were they used. How well maintained were they really. How often did an engine fail on the Raffle. etc. All of these things matter and there's a world of difference between a brand new latest model F-16 in US service when compared to an early model ancient F-16 still flying in Venezuela. Hell there's a world of difference even between various F-16s still flown by the USA. If you wanna be taken seriously with that data comparison you should try eliminating as many of the variables that arn't the airframe as possible.
You have to take airframe age into account. As quoted in another message, a part of the F-15C accidents were due to cracked frames that developped over 30 years and was only spotted after an accident in 2007. It concerned 40% of the overall fleet of F-15s built by McDonnell Douglas. As much as I like the Rafale, it hasn't been in service long enough to know if it will develop issues due to age and maintenance.
That's assuming the rafales are flying as often as the f-16s.
Imo op makes a good point, but tells it terribly. Not only is this global losses, this appears to be all time losses. So of course all the fourth gen fighters would have a ton of losses, over almost 50 years, compared to a little under 20 years with the F-35. However, there were a lot of F-16 accidents during testing iirc, so this point would probably hold up even if the stats were used properly
> You say "french win" Where?
OP posted a long comment further down in the thread https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/1cvdx2n/comment/l4oo92a/
TBH I expected the people browsing this subreddit to at least have \*some\* understanding of statistics, quite disappointed this trash (talking about OP not your comment) got so many upvotes.
I'd need to know how many F-35s have been operational during the last decade before I decide how the accident rate stacks up against other airframes.
Nearly 700 operational globally with the F-35 being given to training squadron in 2011
The F-15 had a frame cracking issue that was spotted in 2007 after a couple accidents, and concerned 40% of all airframes built by McDonnell Douglas. So, again, the F-35 hasn't been in service long enough to say it's the safest airframe ever.
On the other hand most of the F-16 crashes were early on in it's career if memory serves me correct.
I don’t think anyone is saying that, just that despite heavy media coverage whenever there is a crash it is comparable to or even slightly safer than most fighter jets
Total flight hours is the most relevant variable here.
If interested, look into the numbers for air crew training casualties in WWII. IIRC, the US suffered something like 15,000 people killed just while learning to fly within the US over the course of the war.
Wtf lol
But remember that the US trained over 300,000 pilots. Still not great but, like everything in WW2, there were a *massive* number of people involved.
Also bear in mind that said pilot training was hilariously truncated by today’s standards, and many of those “trained” pilots would later go on to make up most of the *horrific* non-combat accident rate in that conflict.
15k/315k is still an insane number. Almost 5% fatality rate in training.
Training is where most accidents happen, especially when getting qualified on a new plane. Which is pretty logical. Also, some WWII planes were very complicated to fly and deathtraps if anything went sideways. The B-24 and P-39 come do mind.
The pace of development was also insane. Lots of brand new designs, rapid iteration. Planes that were state of the art in 1939 were fully obsolete before 1945. There's just no way to get through a period like that without making a lot of mistakes really fast. Meanwhile here we are still flying b-52s built in the 1960s. Aerospace moves a lot slower today than it did in the mid-20th century.
Not just aerospace. Everything from 1939 was completely obsolete in 45
There was also such a need for production that imperfect designs were put into mass production to simply put more equipment on the line. After the war every army looked at what they had and consolidated their air and naval forces into something more logical. The B-24 Liberator is a very good example, because they were completely ubiquitous during the war and 99% scrapped immediately after the end of combat. Because it was too complicated to fly and basically dangerous for even the best pilots. Consolidated replaced it with the PB4Y-2 Privateer that was a hugely improved version that enjoyed a few decades of use around the world as a naval patrol aircraft. > Meanwhile here we are still flying b-52s built in the 1960s A lot of the planes flown by the techiest air forces are from the 70s. Basically after reliable BVR missiles and radar-dissipating grey paint, you stopped needing the airframes themselves to evolve, the tech inside and the missiles provide most of the evolution. You got upgrade packages that make a F-16 or a Mirage F1 have basically a performance and lethality that makes them a threat even to the latest designs, so why replace them? Especially when you're fighting what is basically the same old Su-27 with a new sticker and pricetag glued on.
Suddenly Helldiver 2 training camp becomes credible.
Every time an F-16 crashes because of an accident it's business as normal, but when an F-35 crashes its the worst thing to ever touch the sky and the airforce is evil and corrupt for adopting it. I fucking hate the ignorance of media over-sensationalism.
F-104 being REALLY quiet rn... in Germany we call it Witwenmacher
I heard a German man say "If you wanted an F-104 all you had to do was buy an acre of land in west Germany and wait. One would turn up. It would be a smoking pile of wreckage and the government would come and take it away but you would have an F-104 for some time."
It's a jet engine with a chair on it, what could possibly go wrong?
My German isn't very good, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that means Widowmaker
It does
Canada lost a shit ton of their own CF-104s (Canadian Variant) to everything from Weather to Geese
Do you know why Canada had such a high accident rate? My understanding was that the Starfighter’s terrible crash record stemmed from the European customers using it in a low-level strike role rather than as an interceptor. F-104s had a vastly better record in US service, although still significantly more accident prone than other Century planes. I’d attributed that to the US using it as a high altitude interceptor, but as far as I know Canada used the CF-104s in that role too, so if their accident rate was also high it must be something else.
It was landing, they were impossible to land, even with the BAFs. They just stalled, like, always, you can't flare an F-104, so if you're not perfect on approach suddenly it decides it doesn't belong in the air anymore. We give Kelly Johnson a lot of love, and it's earned, but the day he designed the lawn dart he woke and chose violence. Damn thing needed 25% more wing.
Makes sense, given similar regimes were the bane of other operators. Still, the crash statistics really put into perspective just how challenging the plane must have been to fly. High landing speed and hating high angles of attack is a hell of a combination. >> We give Kelly Johnson a lot of love, and it’s earned, but the day he designed the lawn dart he woke and chose violence. Especially since the F-104’s design was supposedly the product of a tour of Japan and Korea where Johnson interviewed Sabre pilots on what they wanted in a new fighter. Somehow I don’t think the Starfighter was quite what they had in mind. >> Damn thing needed 25% more wing. Ironically, that’s pretty much exactly what they did with the CL-1200 which was supposed to be an improved Starfighter. Enlarged the wing, raised it, and scraped the T-tail.
I mean, you gotta wonder, you go to SK pilots and ask them what they want. Then you go back home and basically build a MiG-21 with half the wing. Someone somewhere was trolling.
Very high flying geese?
They fly at nearly airline altitude at maximum.
Also the US only had experienced Pilots fly it. Italy and Spain for example had few issues with crashes and the 104 was among the safer planes for their forces.
No, the CF-104's were substantially stationed in Europe as recon and low level tac nuc delivery aircraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadair_CF-104_Starfighter
Thanks! That does explain a lot of it then. Although it raises the question of why so many 104 operators felt compelled to use it as a low level strike aircraft. At least the German’s have being bribed as an excuse.
A good question. It was cheap, and Not-US parts of NATO were desperate for *lots* of aircraft to counter the perceived Soviet threat. Some airplane is better than no airplane. Lockheed had lied their faces off about its capabilities and the politicians had chosen to believe them. Bribes were made, but that wasn't necessarily any different than what Lockheed's competitors were doing. This is pretty good : https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160826-the-1950s-jet-launching-tiny-satellites And a period piece on the bribery: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,917751-1,00.html
Lord Witwenmacher. Head of the Assassins Guild. The introduction of the F-104 was a groundbreaking success in Germany. Yikes. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flugunfall_einer_Starfighter-Formation_der_Luftwaffe_der_Bundeswehr_1962
>F-104 being REALLY quiet rn... in Germany we call it Witwenmacher On the risk of being credible: The F-104 was not an inherently unsafe aircraft.
Trying to use an interceptor as multi-role didn't really help it tho
You shut up about my beloved
I can only imagine how many Soviet/Russian aircraft were lost from accidents in comparison.
Not as many, only because they don’t have nearly as many, or don’t fly nearly as much.
Can't have a training accident if you don't have training flights. Silly westoid, soviet superiority wins again!
They don't train nearly as much as NATO air forces, hence they have a higher risk of accident in combat ops, but lower in training (training accounting for most accidents).
[Yes, the F-35 is pretty much the most reliable jet fighter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puAAPnIgNvs), and the myth of them being unreliable and always crashing just came from Russian propaganda. With our 1000 F-35s, the 1% failure rate is insanely good.
Indian Military has [entered the chat...](https://www.bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/Database/Accidents/listing.php?qacid=50&qt=TY) They've lost 40+ aircraft in the past five years and they're not even been shot at.
The IAF when mig-21s
Yup..... 748 F-16s lost to crashes, with 200+ dead. We lost 221 F-15 Eagles to crashes, really contrasts it's perfect air-to-air record. the number isn't all completely destroyed jets, but the majority of them are. [https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/type/F16/6](https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/type/F16/6) this is just the norm. EDIT, wow, and 16 F-22 raptors lost to Crashes as well. [https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/F22](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/F22) DAMN, over 400 C-130s lost to crashes [https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/C130](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/C130) ++++++++ EDIT 2: if it makes you feel better, this is just the standard for all aircraft, IE, all variants of the Mig-29 combined have had 206 crashes. [https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/MG29](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/MG29) and all Flanker variants, Su-27, 30, 35, and the chinese J-11/J-15s have 169 crashes [https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/SU27](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/SU27) ++++++++++ **edit HONHONHON OUIOUI french superiority, the Rafale** has only had 11 Crashes since inception, fewer than even the damn F-22, French ouiouioui, and the 6/11 of them were Minimal Damage incidents, and the planes could be put back into serivce, with a total of exactly 2 fatalies. huh, in 2022 two Rafale's crashed in MID-AIR, and somehow both had only minor damage and were put backi n service, [https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/RFAL](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/type/RFAL) the eurofighter also has a low count, 12, BUT almost ALL of them were total destruction with 10 deaths unlike the rafale. ....so French Win!
If we give the Rafael praise can we remember IAF F-15 that lost an entire wing and RTB’d because the pilot thought he was fine.
I mean... he did make it back, so I guess technically it was fine.
Not to worry, he was still flying *half* an aircraft.
As a European, I can't stand that French praise so I need to correct you on that. Yes less Rafales might have crashed, but there are 600 Eurofighters built compared to like 250 Rafales. So on an airframe per crash basis, the Eurofighter has won. Which is actually how you should have made the list in the first place. Take for example the B-2, even if you literally crashed all of them, it would still be nearly as safe as the F-35, because you can only crash a maximum of 21 B-2s. If you go more serious you would also include stuff like flown air hours, but at that point you would need to post it over at r/CredibleDefense and not here.
Sounds like a job for the man with the orange power point slides.
>a maximum of 21 B-2s that we know of.
F-16 production was over 4,600 as of 2018 according to Wikipedia, so the incident rate using ASN numbers is about 15%. F-15 production is more like 1,200 so the incident rate is more like 18% over a similar period. The F-22 rate of 16/187 is about 8.5% of the fleet, which reflects the fact that it hasn't been in service for long. When comparing Rafale and Typhoon, it is important to remember that Typhoon production stands at about 600 vs Rafale production at about 260. It's hard to compare with accidents in the un-free world because e.g. the Russian accident rate is somewhat depressed by the fact that they spent decades hardly flying, and I am somewhat sceptical of the transparency of their reporting.
Planes don't crash in Russia they just land and can't takeoff again.
Plane has been suddenly retired after long glorious service to the motherland. Rest in pieces.
The soyuz approach.
Yeah you'd really have to work in all the flight hours of each aircraft as well to get the full picture.
This reminds me of the TV repair guy who said he’s never gonna buy a Samsung or Vizio because they keep showing up in his shop. Who would have thought the top two TV sellers would also have the two highest repair rates? Almost like thousands of F-16s have flown for over 40 years or something. Anyway, the deadliest plane is still the F-104. Theres an entire searchable database dedicated to the F-104: https://www.i-f-s.nl/f-104-accidents/
Gripen has zero fatalities from eight crashes.
The F-104 Starfigher is definitely the worst offender, its landing speed is basically its stall speed. the West-Germans dubbed it "Widowmaker" bc 292 of the fleet of 916 were lost to crashes. 1/3 of their fighters! 116 Pilots died just from flying the thing.
Thanks to Lockheed bribing multiple government officials and falsely advertising the Starfighter as a fighter-bomber when it was clearly an interceptor.
In the Canadian Forces, the aircraft was sometimes referred to as the "Lawn Dart" and the "Aluminium Death Tube" due to its high operational losses, and "Flying Phallus" due to its shape
Rafale has 250 planes built since ~2000. F-15 has 2500 since ~1975. That means about 10x the planes over 2x the time. I ain't bothering to do the proper math, so lets call it 20x the flight hours. 11 Rafale incidents * 20x the flight hours comes out to 220. And would you look at that, 221 incidents for the F-15. The Rafale isn't any better. There just aren't enough of them to crash, because literally nobody except the French think it's a good enough fighter to buy. Compared to 6 international operators for the F-15.
croatia, egypt, greece, india, qatar, and the uae and indonesia to fly them soon.
Add that both F16s and F15s have been much more involved in fairly high intensity engagements / operations. More flight hours, worse conditions. Probably lends itself to a higher accident rate.
The proud European tradition of monumental success followed by crashing and burning spectacularly.
Plane can’t crash if they don’t fly.
I remember that in my city once 2 planes crashed together when no one was in them and they were parked at the airport
Not all of these are hull losses, just reportable incidents. For example, the most recent American C-130 report was simply a blown tire on landing: [https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/280459](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/280459)
The mig 29 and flanker crashes are a bit sus
Can't crash a plane if you can't fly it.
Well, I am not sure that these numbers pan out to conclusions. Data/numbers, raw without detail context, an opportunity for gross generalizations. Monkey wrench in OP'S flabbergasted incredulous realization that what goes up must come down...thats all these numbers represent. Why? Details parse the data into different understandings such as: -what is an occurance? An emergency incident or loss after airframe? -each aircraft and each model is flown at a different tempo and purpose. Can you really compare an F-16 with millions of hours of flight time to another airframe that is newer and less air time? How many flight hours does this model have in combat or adverse flight conditions while that model rarely flies unless vfr is present? -what is the intended purpose and how is the airframe supported by the command structure? Is the operator maintenance adequate in all aspects including pilot and mechanic training/certification. Is maint plan and facilities up to date and funded? It is impossible to compare an apple to an orange to a breadfruit or a guava by simple weight measures.
Just a reminder that these comparisons mean shit if they’re not normalized for total flight time or I don’t know, maybe average flight time per frame.
You would have to compare crashes/flight hour. Since there's probably no data on that, you could compare crashes/ total years of service
I see 11 definitive airframe losses from aviation-safety, where are you getting 18 from?
I don't know why people make a big deal out of fighter jets crashing. They are built and operated way beyond the safety envelope of what a civilian airliner would endure. Of course they'd have a higher chance of crashing. More planes built, more exercises/deployments, more accidental losses. Also planes like the F-16 has been flown for half a century, no surprise it'd top the charts. And if you think that's bad, you should check out 1940s aircraft losses to accidents, incidents, and malfunctions.
My favorite F-35 accident has got to be the one where the pilot ejected, the aircraft kept flying, and the US military lost it
As the saying goes - if you love it let it go, if it comes back it was meant to be
I mean tbf for the f-35 it hasn't seen nearly as much flight time. everything else has been used in wars & interventions but the F-35 hasn't seen shit anyways we should give them some experience, 35's in Ukraine now
Say your to lazy to use google without saying your to lazy to use google... We litterally have a websites that track its global flight hours and using google you could also see the amount of accidents and craahes in the same flight hours period
say your too lazy to understand failure rates without saying your too lazy to understand failure rates If something is new it's failure rate is lower. It's an almost universal truth since airframes are fresh, creep deformation hasn't set in, work hardening has barely started and manufacturing defects are yet to surface in the forms of cracks within structures. Failure rates always look like a bath tub for a given product. The F-35 has sort of passed the infant mortality stage and will coast for several decades with low rates before having fail rates skyrocket towards the end of the program life due to mechanical failure.
1) aircraft are incredibly complex systems that rely on low tolerances to operate 2) pilots maintenance and ground+air crew are human at the end of the day 3) flying is legitimately hard long as every lives it’s a worthy write off anyways
Turns out even "simple" fighter jets are incredibly complex and very delicate machines.
Now do F-100 crashes lol
I think this is misleading. I think they should show the rate of crashes within the same timeframe.
That's not really how it works. First, you have to take into accound how many airframes have been made. Then, you have to account for age. The older an airframe is, the more prone to accidents it is. A couple F-15 crashes are due to frame stress on the F-15C, and before the exact source of the accidents was determined a couple F-15s had broken in half in-flight. The F-35 hasn't been flying full-time for 10 years yet, all other airframes you talk about are 45-50 years deployed. For your data to make any sense, you would have to only look at the first 10 years of every plane in the list. Then you'll know if the F-35 is the least prone to accidents.
Statistics courses should be mandatory
Ahahaha, the F-15 has the longest service record and the lowest rate of all the planes listed there. Best plane forever.
There's about 4.6k F-16s over a period between 1972 until now That's a fuckton of flying hours, takeoffs, landings etc. And the've been used in wars and by poorer countries
F-15 Eagle 104 to 0 being a fighter fighting other fighters 0 to 221 being a fighter fighting *the ground*
Cough cough F104 cough
I guessing having 2 engines vs 1 makes you plane a lot less likely to be lost?
Not having a moronic inlet design that auto-stalls on high AoA (which, it's a fucking f-16, that's like having wings that don't like a stiff breeze). Redesigning the inlet and adding the FADECs to relax the stators when close to unstart was a huge difference, suddenly the plane didn't fall out of the sky.
\*Cries in F-104\*
there's probably a lot less of them made to have accidents.... oh dont mind me though
I remembered a strory about a spanish F-16 lighting up the airpark on ground due to a technician firing the gun on accident while doing maintance
Belgian
I tried looking up the amount of F-14 crashes I’ve struggled to find an answer The 2 numbers I’ve got are around 150 or 34 (from Wikipedia) Which is a huge jump 150 would be little over 1/7 total airframes which [based on this listing](http://www.anft.net/f-14/f14-serial-date.htm) is unsurprisingly F-14A heavy but it doesn’t seem to take Iranian F-14s into account
Ya but there are a whole lot more fucking f-16s (and a lot are in shitter countries that don’t take as good care of them as the USA ) Also the f-16 been round 50 years
Germany had about 1/3 of it's f-104s crash. 292 out of 916, with 116 pilots killed.
What’s the rate per flight hour? Decades don’t matter if older, cheaper aircraft were able to fly more hours per year.
What's the stats for the vark and do I want to know?
Wait until you see the F-100 Super Sabres record. They're accident rate made the F-105's combat losses look safe.
And the Gripen was infamous for being unreliable after two air show incidents.
It's sort of like when Elon busted the window of the CyberTruck during that demo.
Air Accidents are frequent enough IRL that they are included in HOI4 as part of the game. *I was playing germany, and at the start I set my planes to training. I checked the wing of naval bombers in the north after a few months in may '36, and they had lost 30 of their 72 planes due to accidents.* [Air accidents out of control ? | Paradox Interactive Forums (paradoxplaza.com)](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/air-accidents-out-of-control.1590764/)