Interesting. A good family friend of ours is a maintenance supervisor in the RAAF. Last time he invited me down to the hangar to let me see the F/A-18s up clo

Interesting. A good family friend of ours is a maintenance supervisor in the RAAF. Last time he invited me down to the hangar to let me see the F/A-18s up close, he was lamenting how the first batch that the RAAF purchased (which I assume are among the ones this guy bought) were getting really fatigued and increasingly difficult to maintain. He mentioned that instead of the routine 4 hours maintenance required for each hour of flying time, they were requiring upwards of 10+ hours maintenance per flying hour. Sounds like these beasts will be expensive money pits to operate nowadays.