What was a Dragon Rapide? True commercial aircraft are extremely
reliable, but they hardly operate in a harsh flight regieme, and they
are highly overbuilt for the job. Still, a plane with 20,000 flight
hours at an average of 450 mph is still brand new compared to an
interstellar flight of 20 light years at .98 C with no maintenance
stops. Its a whole different universe of operation.
>
> > THe more cutting edge ones always had
> > higher maintenance requirements, with the exception of some of our new
> > military planes like the F-22,
>
> Interestingly, Lockheed were able to provide better SR-71 maintenance (and
> the SR-71 was far ahead of its time, let alone cutting edge) for the CIA
> with a very small group of Lockheed technicians than the USAF could manage
> with far more people (I think the figures were something like five
> Lockheeders vs fifty USAF), so military experience may not tell us much.
> And shuttle maintenance is notoriously bloated...
>
>
Well, one could say that the skunk works guys were the ones who built
it, so that may be an advantage over using high school graduates or
dropouts who were drafted. Plus Kelly Johnson never liked having people
who just did heavy looking on, like so much military work is.
Additionally, the CIA got a new plane, while the USAF got a well used
plane. Maintenance time goes up with airframe age.
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@tpk.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/Mikey's Animatronic Factory My Own Nuclear Espionage Agency (MONEA) MIKEYMAS(tm): The New Internet Holiday Transhumans of New Hampshire (>HNH) ------------------------------------------------------------ #!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL @k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_ ]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256; &S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}