Originally Posted by Garage Years
If I buy a car and park it in my garage for 20 years, does that make it the safest car ever built? Statistically yes.
Your post, as well as several other people's on this thread, assumes that Soviet-built aircraft flew very little. What do you base that assumption on? Cold War prejudice mixed with a lot of thin air, is my guess. Or did you even do minimal research? Have you looked into it, or do you just repeat, without verifying, what other like-minded people have been telling you ?
If you want to know the truth, there are ways to verify what you have said. For example by looking at used aircraft sales ads. They often provide the age and total time of the aircraft. Go for example on
SpeedNews - The Source for Aviation News and Information. Lets look at a few ramped aircraft.
"Western Aircraft"
A 1957 C130 with 11,600 hours TT. Thats an average of 219 hours of flight per year.
There is a 1967 Buffalo with 18,167 hours TT. Thats 422 hours per year.
Soviet now:
A 1968 An-12 with 33,923 TT for 808 hours per year (there are others with as little as 220 hours per year)
A 1982 An-26B with 10789 TT for 385 hours a year.
A 1983 IL-76TD with 19,315 TT for 715 hours per year (there is another that flew 284 hours per year)
I found a report that indicates that the US military C-130s flew an average of about 480 hours per year (between 268 and 687 per year) and that High time US Military C-130 airframes had about 16,000 hours TT. The C-141s were retired when they reached their 30,000 service life (730 hours a year) and the high time C-5 has just 22,000 hours (523 hours a year).
With these figures in hand, how can you claim that Soviet Aircraft didn't crash because they "spent 20 year parked" ?