Originally Posted By: billt460
I live just a few miles from Luke Air Force Base. It has the largest F-16 fighter wing in the world. Most every F-16 pilot goes through some portion of their training at Luke. F-16's are always in the air. For some reason it gets noticeably louder at the end of the month, when they start using afterburners more. I've been told that's because they want to burn up their monthly fuel allotment, so it won't be reduced. However I have no idea if that's true. Perhaps Astro could comment on that. I've often wondered if it was B.S. or not. If it isn't you would think someone would have caught on by now.
The unfortunate truth of the Pentagon budgeting, which is the product of quite literally thousands of congressional laws and regulations, is that you must spend your budget in this year, to justify getting it next year. We used to budget by quarter, and the same thought process was applied: spend your OPTAR (fuel money) down to zero at the end of every budgetary reporting period.
So, if budgeting monthly, then, yeah, burn it down to zero, or risk the bean-counters cutting your funding in the next month, without regards to your training, your operational commitments, your tasking from higher headquarters, any of it.
I've got a great story about the "budgeteers" with their spreadsheets, and analysis, and slavish devotion to policy and process without understanding operational impacts. Bear with me...
In 1995-1996, I managed (via a spreadsheet of my own creation) the fuel $$ for CVW-8. I tracked the fuel for each aircraft type (F-14, F/A-18, S-3, EA-6B, E-2C and HH-60) by the gallons used and plugged in the cost to arrive at the fuel budget. Updated daily from the maintenance guys who would give me the "upload" numbers - how many gallons pumped for each squadron and updated daily from the ops guys who'd give me the sorties flown for each squadron.
At the end of a year of doing this, I had a running average cost/gallons per sortie for each aircraft type. I could predict, to within a few hundred $$, what a flight schedule, consisting of hundreds of sorties for an entire air wing, would cost. I had a predictive accuracy of about 1%, based on historical data, and an understanding of the operational environment. Our fuel budget was about $ 7.5M/quarter, if we were funded at "100%" of operational necessity. This was in the days when jet fuel was about .65 - .72/gallon. Roughly 10 cents/pound.
So, this was also in the days of the first budget battles and government shutdown. Across all of the Atlantic Fleet, budgets for airwings were sharply reduced. We got cut to $4.5M for a quarter based on the "budgeteer" rules. We weren't deploying, and hence in shore-based training mode, and so they gave us their pre-planned fuel $$ allotment of "60%"
Except that our ops schedule changed after we were budgeted. So, we WERE deployed that quarter, and expected to train at full levels flying, 90 sorties per day, and I said, at the beginning of the quarter, "we need $2.8M more or we can't do this" to my wing commander, great guy, who then sent a formal message to the 3-star in charge of all Atlantic Fleet Aircraft (AIRLANT).
This caused such a ruckus in the halls of the admiral's staff, particularly among the budget folks, that the admiral himself flew out, along with an O-6 budget guy, to meet us aboard the ship. In the meeting on $$, budget guy wanted to see my numbers. In what he thought was an "ah-ha" moment of catching me being all screwed up, he noticed that my cost per flight hour was all "wrong" according to the budget guidelines that he, himself, had created. Note that this guy wasn't an aviator. Never flew. He was maintenance all the way.
His budget guidelines stipulated that a planning number of $900 (again, based on fuel cost at the time) be used for an F/A-18 sortie. I planned them at $1,500. "See, they don't know what they're doing, Admiral! They're just wasting fuel! They're not following your guidance on fuel management!"
Or words to that effect.
Well, the issue was this: an F/A has a maximum landing weight on board a ship of 33,000 lbs. Structural limit. That translates to a landing fuel of about 3,000 lbs. Given the base weight of the F/A-18 and the training weapon load (FLIR, AIM-9, etc.) that the admiral required us to carry for the training that we were directed to accomplish.
An F/A-18 launches with 17,500 lbs of fuel. It can't land with more than 3.000 lbs. It must therefore, burn, or dump, 14,500 lbs of fuel to be within structural landing limits of the airplane on a ship. That fuel cost, yep, you got it, $1,500. There was simply NO WAY TO BURN ANY LESS.
The admiral, a fighter pilot, who had directed our airwing to be at sea, and to fly the sorties we were flying, instantly understood. Budget guy, a Captain, did not. We weren't screwed up. Budget guy was. He planned a cost per sortie that simply couldn't have been achieved within the engineering limits of the airplanes.
We got our $2.8M request.