There's a term "hangar queen" for aircraft that fly a little and need a lot of maintenance. Sometimes you want extreme performance at any cost. But a lot of th

There's a term "hangar queen" for aircraft that fly a little and need a lot of maintenance. Sometimes you want extreme performance at any cost. But a lot of the time you want a good enough performance at low cost. The amount of supporting resources and length of maintenance breaks etc affect cost, or the amount of aircraft you need to get in order to be able to do the mission. If you have 20 aircraft but 15 are being maintained, you only have 5 flyable ones, you still had to pay for acquisition of all the 20, and have to pay for the ongoing maintenance for the 15. If you have 10 but only 5 are maintained at any given time, you have the same flying capacity of five aircraft but your total costs are likely going to be much less as you only had to acquire ten aircraft and only have to have maintenance people enough for 5 at a time. This is really hard to explain to a lot of people in the software industry by the way. They say a feature is complete, my job is done. But if it's extremely hard to configure, deploy, monitor, maintain etc then it might turn out to be a net negative. It's the whole iceberg that counts, not the tip.