So yeah, apparently the DoD spent $486 million for 20 Italian-made Aeritalia G.222 aircraft that had been retired from the Italian Air Force, then upgraded and refurbished them in the U.S. for the Afghan Air Force. This handy little STOL transport (which the U.S. military operates as the C-27 Spartan) is sort of a mini-C-130. Well, it turns out that spares couldn’t be found for the 16 that made it as far as Afghanistan and the entire fleet just flew something like 200 hours combined. Writing the project off, they were towed to to the other side of Kabul airport and sold to an Afghan scrapper for 6-cents on the pound, or about $32,000.
Whoops.
