#2 Don't know if I agree about the part in the Article that the cost of the machine may fall as the maintainers learn how to fix it......that paints Marine Aviation as a bunch of dumb grunts (no pun intended) but perhaps the author meant that as the aircraft matures and more data becomes available, the service life of critical items can be extended; the USN started with a 500 hour high time for the J-52 and through alanysis and planned increments, took the life up to 1000 before the Intruder was retired Now modular component time tracking ( or event/cycles) means that a critical item could last forever, as long as the individual pieses were replaced. This gets way deep in the weeeds of stats and a robust PM system.
For the record, the USMC airdales I worked with were top notch, didn't matter if they were rotor heads or fixed wingers. |