In response to posts that were deleted because they were off-topic,
@WHOHE had asked me to enlighten him on the mistakes he may have made in criticising the level of availability of French aircraft. So I'll do it here, and I apologise for the repetition regarding the way the French manage the consumption of its fighter aircraft potential.
First of all, you have to understand that availability is not a characteristic of the aircraft, but a characteristic of the aircraft and of the organisation that is put in place to ensure its maintenance.
Indeed, even with an aircraft that does not perform well in this area, you can put a large maintenance team at its disposal and a large stock of spare parts at the foot of the aircraft, and you will have a correct availability. But still, depending on the quality of the aircraft, it is more or less easy to achieve performance in this area.
The problem with the F-35, for example, is that high-level military officials have set availability targets and the US is unable to set up an organisation around the F-35 that will allow it to meet these targets. Because engine repairs take too long and there are not enough spare engines, because engines fail more often than expected, and because ALIS is full of false alarms and non-detections, which immobilises aircraft that are capable of flying and allows aircraft to fly that the maintenance technicians refuse to accept to fly.
In France we don't have these problems with the Rafale. It is an aircraft that is very easy to maintain and the management is done in such a way as to consume the potential of the aircraft in a regular manner. The objective was to consume the potential in 30 years. As the aircraft was given for 7,500 flight hours, that is 250 hours per year, and as the NATO standard for good training is 180 hours per year, that gives us 1.4 pilots per aircraft.
The number of aircraft we buy is determined by the operational need: we estimate the number of flight hours according to the missions to be carried out, and we divide this number by 250 to get the number of aircraft needed. So in addition to the Mirage 2000, the number of flight hours of Rafale that France needs is 152 * 250 = 38000 h per year.
So what happens when an aircraft has reached its allotted 250 flying hours?
The aircraft is simply stored at the Châteaudun base in conditions that prevent it from deteriorating and is declared unavailable. But this is a management unavailability, not a technical unavailability. If a crisis broke out, these planes would become available again overnight. It is because of these management unavailabilities that the overall availability of the Rafale is low.
But there are new elements:
The operational life of 7,500 hours was the result of calculations and tests carried out at the beginning of the programme. But today, the actual conditions encountered by operational aircraft can be taken into account to recalculate the probable service life of the Rafale. And this calculation gives 9000 hours.
We therefore end up with 228,000 additional hours of potential, which corresponds to 30 aircraft with 7,500 hours of potential! This explains why second-hand aircraft are being sold in Greece and Croatia. Indeed, the proposal to Finland shows that it is possible to commit to producing up to 1,000 flight hours per year per aircraft and even, in "surge", up to 350 hours per month. So if we have the potential available, we can easily provide the 38,000 annual hours with fewer aircraft: this will consume more than 250 hours in the year, but this does not matter any more because the total potential available is beyond any expectation.
Moreover, the Greek aircraft sold will be replaced before 2025 and probably the Croatian aircraft after 2025. The increase in potential therefore allows us to manage the transition and to replace aircraft that cannot be upgraded to F4.2 with aircraft that will be released directly in this standard.
