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Indeed, but planes are quite repairable. I don't have a source for this (too lazy to look), but I briefly worked for boeing on a government contract to service C-17 aircraft for the air force. There was a story there of a C-17 landing on a dirt/sand field somewhere in the middle east (this is normal there) except in this case there was a small concrete barrier out in the middle of the field that wasn't seen. The front nose gear impacted the barrier and it torn the nose gear off along with a large chunk of the underside of the fuselage. As the front of the plane touched the ground, the hole scooped up sand and blasted a ton of it into the cargo bay. A crew was flown out there and they "fixed" it and it was flown back to the states.

Another popular instance was the Lockheed EP-3 flying the China coast in 2001 before impacting a Chinese fighter in the air and making a forced "rough" landing. It was taken apart and shipped back to the states where it was repaired in Waco Texas and continues to patrol the China coast to this day.




> planes are quite repairable

The Qantas A380 from Singapore to Sidney that had an uncontained engine failure was repaired and entered service again, at an estimated cost of about $150m, or about 1/3 of the price of a new one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32




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