The Air Force Can Reduce Its Stated Requirements for Strategic Airlift Crews

Maintaining more crews than necessary to fly the C-5 and C-141 strategic airlift planes is costly and unjustified. The Air Force has determined that it needs four crews for each of these aircraft, but due to efforts to preserve the service life of the C-5 by limiting the flying hours of the fleet, only 3.25 aircrews are presently authorized for each C-5. The Air Force has developed and uses a computer model simulating the operations of the strategic airlift system under wartime conditions to determine crew needs. However, a number of factors the Air Force uses are unrealistic and tend to overstate crew needs.