often, old infrastructure is being loaded well beyond its design load
they used fat safety factors and modern engineers just say "oh we don't need that big a safety factor" and recertify the structure for a larger load
that works okay right up until it doesn't
White men fueled by coffee and nicotine, armed with slide rules and smarts, created machines to last the rest of their lives. Now those have been inherited by their children who wonder if they can push them to go 2 or 3 lifetimes instead.
I do notice that the whole SLEP talk thing seems to have subsided. Wonder if it’s on the outs, and they’d rather just buy new F15s and use the dying fleets as an excuse for more 35’s. I still believe a lot of their GWOT flights were meant to prematurely age the fleet to strongarm congress into giving them more F35s to begin with
