Now You Can Buy Your Very Own F-16 Fighter Jet
A company in Florida is selling a 1980 F-16 for $8.5 million.
While extremely cost prohibitive, buying your one warplane is legal as the planes are demilitarized.
However, the purchase price doesn't include the price of maintenance and operation, which can costs thousands per flight hour.
A Florida company is offering a truly unique used aircraft for sale: an F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet available for the cool price of $8.5 million. Once a deadly predator of the skies, the aircraft is almost certainly sold without its internal gun, rockets, missiles, and bombs, and radar system.
The aircraft, previously listed for sale at Controller before being taken down, is described as an F-16 fighter jet manufactured in 1980 with 6,000 flight hours. The sale also includes a front-aspect photo of the aircraft in question, and the aircraft is apparently in storage at Palm Beach, Florida.
Most details of the aircraft involved in the sale are blocked out and behind a paywall, but from the limited amount of information offered for free we can discern a few things. The jet is advertised with a date of 1980.
The latest version, F-16V Block 70, includes a new active electronically scanned array radar, conformal fuel tanks, digital data link, GPS, and automatic system that prevents the aircraft from accidentally colliding with the ground.
The F-16 for sale has 6,000 flight hours on its airframe, according to a now-deleted post. Early F-16s were built to fly for 8,000 miles before retirement, so a prospective owner would likely have about 2,000 hours of flying enjoyment before having to invest in structural upgrades. Interested parties should also be aware that fighters can be maintenance-intensive, needing hours of work for a single hour of flight, and the cost of fuel can push flying into the thousands of dollars per hour.
The jet is also demilitarized, having been stripped of its 20-millimeter M61 Gatling gun and probably the nose-mounted radar as well. That having been said, most of that stuff is internal, so losing them won’t affect the jet’s rakish good looks.
Is all of this legal? Yes. There are numerous examples of civilian-owned fighters in the U.S. One of the most famous examples was actor Michael Dorn, Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation, who at one point owned his own F-86 Sabre fighter. After 9/11 the U.S. military suspended direct sales of military vehicles—particularly tanks and fighter jets—to civilians, so this jet must have been imported from a NATO or other friendly nation.
So for just $8.5 million, you can skip the TSA lines and fly yourself across the country in your own warplane.
You Might Also Like
