MH-139A Grey Wolf helicopter to guard US nuclear missile silos

newatlas.com

> It also requires less maintenance with only 1.3 hours of hangar work required for every hour of flight.

I winced at this. As a mechanical engineer by training, and tinkerer by choice, I understand that things that fly are life critical and need a very high level of assured reliability. Still, spending more time in maintenance than at work seems a strategic liability. Is this really the best that can be done? Why?

The CH-124 helicopters canada used to have were often jokes about for their heavy maintenance requirement. It says in the link below that they needed 30 man-hours of maintenance for each flying hour. I don't know how that would translate into hours of "hangar-work"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Sea_King_replacemen...

That’s wild. To have 24/7 availability for one requires 30 more in maintenance. I can see why the 1.3 hour metric is so vaunted - only two extra are needed in maintenance (assuming apples to apples comparisons).

I’m trying to imagine that being true of servers and still hitting a reasonable SaaS SLA, but I can’t.

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