Originally Posted by
engineer(retard)
I also disagree with some elements of your civil/ military support concept. It is much easier and cheaper to run aircraft that have large fleets and a worldwide market to buy spares from.
Only for those aspects of the aeroplane which are identical in the military and civilan versions, which can be surprisingly few (see the discussions on the Air Force 1 programme). A classic example is the concepot of shared spares pools. If a civil and military operators share a pool of "safety/performance-significant" spares then at the moment* the CAA will not allow any RAF-used spares to be returned to the spares pool because the RAF's controls do not meet the CAA's requirements for a "controlled environment". So once a part has gone to the military it cannot be returned back through the repair/refurbishment route for use by the civilian partner in the spares pool. It must either be discarded or separately stored for military use only (negating the point of the shared pool).
Then there is the detail that often the military version of the aeroplane will have operating broader clearances than the civil version, so parts used in the military version have been exposed to environments and stresses which would cause them to be declared unservicable in the civilian environment. They are also maintained using different tools & procedures and to different schedules in the two environments, further adding to the difficulty in accepting they've been in a controlled environment.
Fundamentally the military version of a civil type is simply not just the same aeroplane in a combat jacket. It's a different aeroplane which is used and maintained differently, and that's where the comparison to "world fleets" just falls over.
But also civil and military support systems have fundamentally different objectives. A civil support system is focussed on minimising or eliminating the financial loss arising from a technical failure. It is predicated on the >99% true axiom that the consequences of any failure can be acceptably addressed by paying money to someone. The Military requirement is different - the loss of a mission can mean people die and wars are lost, so no amount of money will fix it.
PDR
* My last direct involvement with this was about four years ago, so it may now finally have changed