Spheroid,
I agree that it seems a lot of people per aircraft and I admit that it was a long time ago, but those were the numbers I was given by one of their SNCOs. There may've been a misunderstanding in that he included all the people on the GR1 det not just the engineers, but what I didn't mention in the earlier post - in the interests of brevity - was that during the same det there was a visit from some fairly highly-paid RAF help (one-star ish I seem to recall) who I hosted when he visited our Mirage 2000 unit. He point-blank refused to believe that we could maintain an operational capability with so few engineers for 8 aircraft.
Even allowing for rapidly-approaching senility, I don't think those numbers were too far adrift, but whether I'm right or not (and I'll be the first to put my hand up if I'm talking carp) the point I'm trying to make is that the French are very good at going to an operational theatre in double-quick time, with a small number of bods and being up and running in no time flat. They've had a lot of practice in places like Chad and they seem to have learned the lesson that reliability is a highly effective force-multiplier.