WEBF,
Please listen.
The cost of maintaining a fleet has two elements:
- Variable cost based on the number of aircraft, aircrews, amount of flying, number of bases (including CVS)
- Fixed cost based on the cost of support (design, commercial, training, tactics, certification and engineering), and at least one base, at least one simulator
The cost per flight hour is the (Variable cost + Fixed Cost) / (Total Number of hours per year).
You can drive down the variable costs by reducing numbers and flying hours, but the Fixed costs remain, um, fixed. So if you were to cut Harriers one airframe at a time, the most expensive one would be the last one, because Fixed costs are an increasingly large percentage of the overall cost.
Therefore (as I've said before) the savings are made when you cut an entire fleet because the Fixed element goes as well. Having two small fleets (eg Tornado + Harrier) requires two lots of the fixed costs, driving the overall cost up.
So please; you, along with many of us, lament Harrier's passing. But if you're going to (pointlessly) rage against the dying of the light, at least do so from a position informed by the facts.
S41