In article . net,
Craig Fink wrote:
In practice, you'd be crazy to buy one -- part of the reason they're being
retired is that they are hideously expensive to maintain -- but then,
there are some crazy people out there...

That's because your from Canada and still believe that Queen of England is
the sovereign entity, not the individual...

Funniest posting I've read this week!

that's the system you live under. You have a birth right Queen (or King).

And this is worse than having a birth right President... how, exactly? :-)

At least *we* don't let them have any real power. (It may not be obvious,
but essentially everything the Queen says in public is cleared through the
Prime Minister's office first, and anything dealing with actual policy is
mostly written there.)

We can hope that Bush's near-elimination of the inheritance tax will be
rolled back as he departs, which will help. (If this sounds like a non
sequitur, note that Theodore Roosevelt instituted that tax mostly to help
*prevent* the US from developing a de-facto hereditary aristocracy.
Unlike a lot of more-recent occupants of the White House, TR was genuinely
concerned with the long-term future of his country.)

As for the relevance of political system to private aviation, note that at
one time, the few jet fighters in private hands "in the US" were mostly
kept in Canada, because the US government was so hostile to the idea. Ah,
the US, that bastion of individual freedom...

I don't consider it crazy to what to take a ride in an F-14, or watch a
formation of F-14s fly by at an air show 50 years from now. Without the
high performance weapons, it's just a high performance jet.

An exceedingly complex one, that even today's USN finds almost impossibly
expensive to operate. Deleting the weaponry, and more importantly the
sensors, will help, but it's still a complicated, high-maintenance, costly
aircraft. Fast jets generally are not cheap to run, but the F-14 is an
extreme case even by those standards. The situation will only get worse
as the aircraft age and the remaining spare parts get used up.

Note carefully: I didn't say it was crazy to want to see F-14s, or to
want to ride in one -- only to want to *own* one.

If you want high-performance-jet rides, and high-performance jets showing
off in airshows, there are much cheaper choices. There's a reason why,
after half a century, P-51s are everywhere while flyable P-38s are much
less common: the extra complexity and operating cost of the P-38 buy you
very little. Similarly, strip the F-14 of its weapons and sensors, and
it's not a particularly remarkable aircraft.
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