S41 - The decision to cancel the F136 was rational. Why, the pro-GE side even raised the spectre of an engine-related fleetwide grounding! No way anything like that would happen.
I mentioned several pages about how wise it was to have all your eggs in one basket, with regards to the F35. The same applies to engines.
Any piece of equipment can manifest some kind of systematic fault at any stage of its life, no matter how good the testing regime is. The probability of that gets lower as we understand the engineering and modeling better, but its not perfect.
So yes, one argument is that a staged implementation of a system with any hours dependent issue, can be managed. But there's still a " what the f#$k" amount of dead time when something happens, and when you can decide that parts of the fleet can keep operating.
Whilst in the early stages of deployment, this wlil not be a problem as their are other platforms to take up the slack, this is not the case for countrys that rely on it, or when you have retired your other platforms.
There must be some ballsy strategists and probability experts in some countries. In our case nothing will change, we can just go running back under the yanks skirt if the worst was to happen
