"Breaker, breaker one-nine, good buddy... We got us a Ponzi Scheme!"

Behold...less maintenance manpower assumptions have been F-35s selling points. If everything is so wonderful in F-35 world, we need less maintainers. Not status quo.

The quality of slide number 7 of this Norway brief isn't very good but here are the high points for F-35 Ponzi-Schemism....

-62 percent less manpower deployed scenario.
-10-20 percent increase in aircraft availability
-No scheduled depot level maintenance
-Overall maintainability increased by 2x over legacy
-50 percent fewer spares
-60 percent less support cost
-47 percent less logistics footprint by weight
-43 percent fewer pallets for 30-day deployment.
-30 percent reduction in training system
-Prognostics and health management (PHM), "Smart" aircraft design continously monitors F-35 health
----Reduces unscheduled maintenance events
-Unscheduled Maintenance Man-Hours per Flight Hour (MMH/FH) 5x less
-Total ownership costs 20 percent less than legacy
-Mission reliability: 97.1 percent
-Sortie generation rate: 3.64
-Maintenance man hours per flight hour: Typical twin-engine fighter: 12.2, F-16 A/B: 5.9, F-16C/D BK50/52: 4.5, F035 CTOL : 2.3

3.6 World War II's after contract award, with nowhere near a finished product, how we doin' today?


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