the department’s spending habits won’t be changing anytime soon, as it plans to spend almost $1 billion over the next 10 years – in spare parts – to keep its fleet of 2,500, 25-year-old medium sized trucks on the road. That works out to almost $400,000 per truck.
Spending that kind of money on old junk defies logic, said March, when buying new would be much cheaper. "How many of us would spend $500 a month to maintain a 1980 car, when we know that we can go to the bank or dealer, and for $300 a month, lease a brand new car?
“This is the position the Department of National Defence is in”… "At the current time, the fleet is managed by a thing called crack propagation. They fly the plane, they measure the length of the cracks in the wings… if it’s growing too fast, they’ll ground it. If it’s growing slowly they’ll try and get one or two more flights out of it.
“This is the state of our fleet and as a result about 75 to 80 cent of those airframes are parked.”
