Globemaster aircraft resupplies CFS Alert at the top of the world

That sounds good on the surface, but given that the Herc costs less than a third to operate than the Globemaster, it's not as good as the CF makes it sound.

Regardless, the Globemaster is an awesome aircraft, and something we have needed for years. It's good to have airplanes with these capabilities.

-J.

It's only good if we can afford to operate it.

If it sits in a hangar all the time (like lots of CF-18s), then we would have been better off not buying it and investing in something else military related ($3.4 billion still buys a fair amount of hardware these days).

My point is that, as good as it is (which is very), it's an amazingly expensive beast to fly (around $50,000 per hour), whereas the Herc is somewhere around $12,000-$15,000. It might not sound like much when we spend almost $20 billion on defence, but it adds up real quick when you start talking about 100s of hours.

In this case, the CF is bragging that it takes three Hercs to carry the equivalent of on Globemaster, but had we done it that way, we would actually have saved several thousand dollars. Do that once a week and all of a sudden we're talking about a lot of money.

The C17's are well used and they can take 18 aircraft pallets compared to 5 for the C130.

One trip and 18 pallets. Good stuff.