It would appear…
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/02/17/jet.fighter.ap/index.html
that somebody somehow got their hands on an F/A-18, and is selling it on eBay. It can be yours if you pony up a lousy $9 million.
It’s currently one of the Navy’s top fighters, and it goes Mach 2. How could a private citizen come to posess one of these, and are there any real impediments (besides the fact I have nowhere near that kind of cash) to me buying this puppy?
BTW, see also:
But to the question: IIRC, in the USA what’s required, provided that the seller is legitimately entitled to sell the airplane, is that the Hornet have its sting taken off – disarm it and cripple what weapons launching/control systems are fixed so that it won’t carry/launch live ordnance. Obviously, any classified avionics will have been taken out long before. Comply with that, and it is perfectly legal for a private pilot to own and fly any military-model jet.
Besides that, FAA regs probably forbid you cracking the barrier above your kids’ school, or doing Mach-2 over downtown.
I suspect there is much more to this story. Stating that the “aircraft is apart only for transporting purposes and needs to be gone through and re-assembled.” is a bit of understatement as it is a decidedly non-trivial task. In the navy a plane that has not flown in 30 days is a assigned a special maintenance status, spintac or special interest aircraft, as it is often very difficult to get an aircraft back in safe flying condition. This is an extremely complex aircraft that has been disassembled for ten years. Bearings and hydraulic seals go dry, rubber hoses crack, corrosion, etc. etc. Also it has never been demilitarized so it will require extensive modification to remove and disable weapons systems. This is a bit more than putting a sheet metal patch where the bullets come out of the Vulcan gun. I’m pretty sure the F-18 uses inertial navigation so the primary navigation system is integrated with the weapons system.
I’m also a little suspicious that there are no pictures of the disassembled plane. I won’t say there will never be a civilian owned F-18 but I’m betting heavily against it. OTOH I could be wrong and Larry Ellison will soon have a new toy.
It’s also not just the weapons systems, but that removable computer system that is carefully guarded. Thats what prevents friendly fire incidents and provides sensitive intel. They are just buying the shell.
Would an ex-Blue Angel plane even have a full weapons system on it? I wouldn’t think so. Weapons cost alot of money, and the military doesnt just put them where they aren’t needed.
I agree with Padeye that it would be extremely difficult to get the plane into working order again, if it is even possible. Certainly you would need military help, as the parts needed aren’t going to be at your local plane parts store.
Hi,
Former Air Force fighter pilot here.
Many 1950s-era fighters are now owned by civilians. Very few if any newer ones are; the cost is simply beyond belief and frankly the 1950s planes have enough performance to scare/kill the typical middle-aged fat-cat pilot-wannabe.
Fairly modern (1970s-1980s) jet trainers are another common toy; the performance is still plenty hot and the costs aren’t nearly as crazy. Google for [L-19 airplane] and you oughta find some examples.
As to “demilitarization”, the laws are quite detailed as to what must be taken off. All the weapon pylons, the wiring, the computers, etc. Anything connected to weapons & fighting. That’s not too hard to do on a 1950s plane where all the systems are discrete.
But on a modern fighter, there’s an interegated network of computers and the ones that provide your instruments and navigation are also the ones which provide the weapons capability. So short of writing new software, there’s no way to remove the weapons capability to the government’s satisfaction.
That essentially forecloses those aircraft from ever being in civilian hands, at least until the details of the regulations are changed to permit the software to exist as long as there’s no wiring leading to bomb racks/missile rails to give the software any teeth.
BUT … given the ever-higher importance of software as the true differentiator of combat capabillity, regs will probably be changing in the opposite direction.
My supposition is that the Viet Nam-era fighters & current-era jet traininers are the last ones we’ll ever see in civilian hands. F-4, T38, BAE Hawk, Aeromacchi 229, Volochody L19 and that’s probably about it.
Somebody asked about the Blue Angel’s aircraft. I can’t speak directly to that, but I was stationed at Nellis AFB, in a unit just down the street from the Thunderbirds.
They had F-16s, just like we did. The only difference was their airplanes had the gun removed to make room for an oil tank to make their white smoke, and they left the weapons pylons off. That and the shiny paint.
On an F-16 the pylons are removable with a few bolts and a couple of electrical connectors, and different pylons are attached to different places (“stations”) on the wings and fuselage depending on the mission.
All the wiring and computers and everything else stayed the same. Yes, that meant some wires weren’t used every day, and that’s “wasteful”, but not nearly was wasteful as the cost of the engineering effort to determine what to remove and to develop the procedures to reliably store & reinstall all of it if/when needed.
They claimed they could put their 7 airplanes back to wartime capability in a couple of days. I’d bet they could do the work that fast, but they might be chasing accumulated gremlins in the wiring for weeks. Unused parts have a way of failing silently that isn’t apparent until you try to use them again.
Removing and reinstalling the gun was a fairly routine operation; some repairs to the regular combat aircraft needed the gun pulled out. A lot more involved than an oil change, but nothing 3 guys with the right tools and training couldn’t do in a couple of hours.
Putting it back in was a similar job but then it had to be aligned properly with the jet (“bore-sighted”) and that took a couple extra hours with some lasers. They still shot poorly for a few missions after a gun change and needed some tweaking to get the gun settled in and tightly aligned with the aiming systems.
Just the opposite. They don’t remove them on a whim. As LSLGuy and I said, the weapons system isn’t just something added to a bare airframe like a gunsight behind the windscreen. The inertial platform is integrated with the rest of a complex system. If you don’t have that you don’t have attitude information on the hud. The horizon line, airspeed and heading info all come from the same computer. You can’t just “remove” the pipper and bomb fall line display as if they were a separate component. With exceptional cases such as some radio communication gear you can’t just remove the boxes that are classified and expect the rest of the system to work.
The us has always made a point of demonstration planes being able to be put back in fighting condition in short order and that’s mostly a new paint job and removal of smoke systems.
Unless there are two ex-Blue Angels F-18s out there,
here is where it was disassembled and first offered for sale. The page that describes the project seems to be missing right now (it was there two days ago) but some of the photos are still live:
They’ve also got an F-16 too, among other fun toys.
So it looks like I can’t have one? 
Nah, it just means you probably can’t have an American one. DOD is a little less persnickity about the software on foreign military planes. Atlas Air founder Michael Chowdry and Wall Street Journal Aviation writer John Cole died tooling around in Chowdry’s Czech fighter trainer. If you want a MiG 29-M, I got a guy. 
Thanks for the links to the pics Pork Rind.
MSNBC has some more information: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4287292/
The plane is being sold as-is so the buyer is going to spend much more overhauling the plane and engineering the missing bits to make it safely flyable.
