Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
The C-130Hs are newer and have more fatigue lift left, as well as better engines, military equipment, and being on the military aircraft price scale. Air forces seem willing to pay more for aircraft than civilian freight operators.
The L-100 has never been a commercially successful aircraft. It costs too much to run, and it's rather large for most of the civilian freight work that needs to go to short rough fields. It's very cool, but that doesn't pay the bills.
Kessler's essentially paramilitary requirements are rather different from a civilian freight line. An L-100 would seem to suit him rather well.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rupert
For what it's worth, civilian transport model IL-76TDs seem to go for about $5 million. New models run at something like $30 million.
Many military and civilian Il-76s were disposed of after the breakup of the USSR, so they would've been available through both legit and dodgy channels. I think if one wanted a muscular transport, with lots of capacity and range, it's the one to get. Still in service, with quite a few made and in use for such a large aircraft, parts and general servicing will be easy to arrange.
I do like the way it's still got a glazed lower nose for the navigator, so if all the fancy instruments fail they can get down there with a map, and find landmarks by eye, the old-fashioned way.
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Sounds like both the L-100-30 and the Il-76 were options when Kessler was buying a transport plane to take people from Galveston to Dominica faster than yachts could steam or any seaplane would go.
That would be before anyone around Kessler was as nervous about modern aircraft failing and he'd have bought the aircraft based on performance, measured against the cost of acquiring it and operating it.
If they were available at similar prices around the fall of the Soviet Union, I get the feeling that the Il-76 is a much more capable plane and while a fully-loaded C-130 (it's possible, I guess that the C-100-30 requires less runway)
could theoretically land at Douglas-Charles Airport in Dominica, it still requires more than
three times the runway length that an Il-76TD requires.
Actually, before the mid-2000s extension to the runway at Douglas-Charles, a C-130 would be operating outside of safety margins if they landed there fully loaded. So the Il-76TD, acquired at the fall of the Soviet Union, seems like a logical possession.
Ironically, of course, now in 2018, some of his employees, like the PCs, will probably consider that old plane far too modern to ever get into.
Edit: The Il-76TD costs about $8,500 per hour to operate, with 55% of that being the 7.5 tons of jet fuel it burns per hour. This is a lot, obviously, but note that it can fly from Scholes International Airport in Galveston to Douglas-Charles Airport on Dominica in about five hours, which means that if it should ever prove necessary, the entire crew of the Penemue, including the 'Night Riders' and some additional support personnel, can be airlifted between those two main theatres of Kessler's influence for about $42,500, which is competitive with the cost of buying everyone economy class flight tickets on a commercial flight and will take significantly less time.