Jaguar reliability

[Agaricus bisporus]

Flight magazine 29 Jan page 22 states that the failure rate for the Adour engine in the SEPECAT Jaguar is six, yes SIX failures per 1000hrs!

Surely this is a ghastly typo, don't they mean per HUNDRED thousand hours???

WW2 piston engines were not as bad as that, surely.

Surely???

[Genghis the Engineer]

The two Jag T2a models that we had on ETPS were never as reliable as 6 failures per 1000 hrs, but maybe if you're only considering the engines that figure is about right. The electrics and avionics are far less reliable than the engines. My recollection is that you brought back a fully serviceable jet about one sortie in 4.

G

[ 29 January 2002: Message edited by: Genghis the Engineer ]</p>

[Agaricus bisporus]

Genghis! Not even as reliable as that???????

6 engine failures per 1000 hr would be about one per 85 hrs in a (twin engined) Jaguar.

This can't be right, one on 80,000 is more like it for civvy ops, are we saying that military engine reliability is ONE THOUSAND times worse than that???

What of the Hawk, also Adour powered? This failure rate would imply a minimum of several failures per year in front of the cameras for the Red Arrows which we know is not the case, not to mention scores of lost Hawks from the training squadrons.

Whats up?

[Genghis the Engineer]

I think you may misunderstand the terminology. A failure in this context means something went wrong that needed fixing, not that the engine stopped generating thrust - that was a much rarer event.

G

[Agaricus bisporus]

AAAH! That make sense, Still, I'd have thought that "engine failure" was a fairly well underestood definition. Perhaps this is anothe case of "spoofed by Journalists!"

As someone else on this forum says, Never let the facts get in the way of agood story!

[Hot 'n' High]

In addition, you need to look at the cycles the engines are subjected to before you try to compare reliability figures, even across the same type of engine.

You can hardly compare a mil. engine which spends an hour, say, cycling repeatedly between idle and full power and flying through all those nasty chemicals and the dust we find down below 5000 ft with a big fan sat at FL350 for 15 hours at cruise thrust. Engine wear is a complex game.

Mind you, was it the Soviet Mig-25 Foxbat engines which had a one flight life if the bird hit Mach 3?

Cheers, H 'n' H <img src="cool.gif" border="0">