[dundercoder]

> A fighter jet and a helicopter based off the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz both crashed into the South China Sea within 30 minutes of each other, the Navy’s Pacific Fleet said.

>The three crew members of the MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter were rescued on Sunday afternoon, and the two aviators in the F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet ejected and were recovered safely, and all five “are safe and in stable condition,” the fleet said in a statement.

>The causes of the two crashes were under investigation, the statement said.

An expensive loss to be sure but no loss of life.

[bandrami]

Though not exactly the image the USN wants to project of this is meant as a show of force

[the_real_cher]

Its a loss of many days of taxpayers lives.

[linhns]

Are the planes recoverable?

[burnt-resistor]

They're definitely total write-offs.

Yes* most of the time. The purpose is the Pentagon doesn't want adversaries or anyone else getting their hands on classified gear or aircraft systems because it's basically flying around with a datacenter nowadays. If it's in deep water, NAVSEA may bust out FADOSS gear and make it a OJT exercise for junior recovery personnel.

In recent memory, the scorecard is:

- Truman (CVN-75): 1: JUL-22, 1: DEC-24 (friendly fire), 1: MAY-25, 1: APR-25

- Nimitz (CVN-68; decomm APR-26): 2: OCT-25

(Consider there are 9 additional carriers too.)

Nimitz does an average (mean) of 18.4 arrested landings a day over a span of 52 years.

Truman went 75000 landings (10-11 years) without a major mishap once upon a time™.

~7-8k fixed-wing landings per year per ship, roughly.

[LorenPechtel]

Even if nothing was damaged (like that's going to happen) after you fish them out of the drink you think they can be put back in service? Just look at the boosters on the Shuttle--the cost to refurbish them after their dip in the ocean was almost as much as buying new. Valuable in as much as it showed the problem that lead to Challenger, but they refused to look.

[iAMkenough]

We're talking about the U.S. and its seemingly limitless military spending.

Even if they were recoverable, they would still order new ones.