[9659]

On paper, this all makes a lot of sense. What is going to happen when these airplanes start falling out of the sky because they are just too old?

50 years is a long time for a piece of machinery. There will be many failure modes that will be discovered in these planes.

The C-130 was thought to last forever. Until about 10 years ago, well used planes being used for firefighting starting having structural failure in flight. Suddenly, organizations flying the older airframes decided that it was no longer effective to take the risk of failure.

[snakeyjake]

Civil aviation does not have the same inspection process that the military does.

The old heavy tankers were all being flown at their limits for decades with nothing more than a dude with a flashlight looking at the insides of them and going "yurp, this is good to go!"

On Air Force aircraft, to include the B-52, thousands of inspectors either look at every single critical part on a regular basis or use random sampling to establish estimated fleet health levels.

https://www.airforce.com/careers/maintenance-and-repair/nond...

I'm willing to bet that each individual B-52 has more paperwork on it and more eyeballs that have seen x-rays and ultrasounds of it than every single aerial firefighting platform in the world combined.

[bigfatkitten]

B-52s are basically ships of Theseus at this point. About the only original part left by the time they're retired will be the build plate with the serial number on it.

Firefighting is uniquely hard on airframes. It imposes all sorts of loads on aircraft that they just don't experience in "normal" operation. For maintenance purposes, one well-known (V)LAT operator I'm familiar with treats one hour of firefighting ops as 7 hours of flight time.