F-15 - Update or retire - Curt Lewis video

Decision Time: Half of US F-15s Need Overhauls - Or Retirement

A U.S. Air Force F-15C Eagle fighter aircraft from the 104th Fighter Wing, Massachusetts Air National Guard, departs Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, for Barnes Air National Guard Base, Mass., on Aug. 12, 2011.

In a backseat ride over New Hampshire, the Eagle shows why it's still lethal, yet increasingly expensive.

WESTFIELD, Massachusetts - The F-15C Eagle weighs about 16 tons, but with nearly 47,000 pounds of thrust pushing it down the runway it feels more like 16 ounces.

In a just seconds, the plane passes 100 miles per hour, then twice that. It hops off the ground but the pilot, Maj. Jay "Fat" Talbert keeps it level, fifty feet up, and pours on more speed. "Here come the G's," Talbert warns his passenger in the back seat. Then he pulls back the stick.

Twin afterburners glow and a thunderous roar covers the peaceful New England landscape as the jet goes vertical. The altimeter spins like a stopwatch - and freezes at 6,000 as Talbert rolls the plane onto its left side and levels out. Then he turns right, heading toward the training area where he will show how this plane, built in 1985 to a 1970s design, can still best foreign-made jets in air-to-air combat.

The question now is whether Air Force leaders want to spend tens of billions of dollars to refurbish the C- and D-model F-15s and upgrade their electronics, or to put the money toward newer aircraft.


"This mission is not going away," Col. Pete Green, vice commander of the Air National Guard's 104th Fighter Wing, said in an interview here. "There is an ongoing need for air dominance fighters."

Officially, the Air Force plans to keep the F-15C/D around for another quarter-century. (Its newer cousin, the ground-pounding F-15E Strike Eagle, is slated to serve even longer.) But in recent years, military leaders have retired more warplanes than planned to save maintenance money and buy newer jets. Several Air Force officials have said the service's top generals are reviewing how the air-to-air-only F-15s fit into that mix.

Among the options: upgrade the fourth-generation F-15, accelerate the purchase of the fifth-generation F-35 Lightning II, or pour the money into the warplane of the future, called Penetrating Counterair.

"We are planning to keep the jet around and viable until 2042 until told otherwise," said John "Heed" McLaughlin, Air Combat Command's F-15 program element manager at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and a former Eagle pilot who oversees the upgrades and improvements to the plane.

The plan is to team the Eagle with the F-22 Raptor, marrying two generations of air superiority fighters.

"We see the F-15 going out for quite some time, working closely with the F-22. We believe that's going to be the backbone of both the U.S. Air Force as well as the Air National Guard," said Steve Parker, vice president of F-15 programs at Boeing, the company that built the jet and is now overseeing many of its upgrades. "That's going to be the backbone of the air superiority capability right into the 2040s."