CliveL
The airworthiness authorities were demanding a safety factor of 3 because nobody had flown under that sort of limit before, so the theoretical life would have been 7000 flights.
The
RELIFE programme had already taken the aircraft to 8,500 cycles, and the escence of
RELIFE 2 had already been agreed when the maggots pulled the plug in late 2003. My own personal guess is that we'd now be looking at RELIFE 3 within a few years if we were still operating. It always really was a case of 'how long's a piece of string' as far as how long the aeroplane could be kept flying.