Guy Leitch

Many African governments have lacked the skills and resources to do major maintenance and repair work to keep older equipment up to date. With the carrot of foreign aid and industrial participation offsets being dangled over procurement departments, the preferred option has usually been to replace older equipment.

However, this may be a false economy. A recent discussion on a WhatsApp group dedicated to the SA Air Force provided interesting insights onto the subject of repair – or replace. The identities of the contributors have been withheld and contributions have been in many instances paraphrased.

It was noted that as warfare gets more asymmetrical, the value in less expensive means of doing the job becomes higher. The value of a mature system is that there are few teething problems and spare parts are usually plentiful.

Thus, for example, many older aircraft, such as the Douglas DC-3 and the AV-8B Harrier, have a long fatigue life and can operate from almost anywhere. While older aircraft require more maintenance hours, maintainers are relatively inexpensive and older people can be retained with incentives far more cheaply than hiring and training new.

Our defence columnist, Darren Olivier, noted that, “Every aircraft type has an operating cost curve. It’s high when first introduced, then reduces for the next 10-20 years as units become familiar with the type and learn the most efficient techniques. The original equipment manufacturers continually improve production techniques, and early issues are ironed out.

“By around 20-25 years of life the cost curves upwards again. You can prolong things with capital investments to replace some of the more obsolete and expensive parts, but you’ll never get back to the operating costs achieved earlier.

“After a few more years, with OEMs no longer producing parts, life extensions become increasingly non-feasible and key knowledge is lost through retirements. The cost climbs rapidly again until it becomes unaffordable for most forces. For example, in 2001 the cost to remove an engine from an AV-8B and take it apart to repair damaged fan blades, such as from a bird strike, was $500 000 ($860 000 today) and took 850 man-hours.

“That said, if your needs are modest and you don’t need much in the way of upgrades, new weapons integrations and so on, you can quite efficiently and effectively operate older aircraft for a while.

“This isn’t an argument to always have the latest and greatest. For instance, Nigeria is quite comfortably operating relatively old Alpha Jets after returning them to service a decade ago, and even re-militarised some ex-civilian examples they bought from US collectors. But the aircraft are also increasingly vulnerable to enemy forces.

Olivier concludes by noting that “by not funding a Rooivalk mid-life upgrade, which would reduce operating costs and improve availability, the South African government is basically ensuring an early retirement of the type.”

Another contributor discussed the retirement of the SAAF’s Cheetahs in 2008 in favour of the Gripen. He noted that, “They were already on wonky legs by 2008 with few of the original fleet going. It was still a capable aircraft with lots of knowledge on how to operate it, but it was becoming very long in the tooth. Add to that Denel’s current woes, and it would have left them in a proper predicament.”

It was pointed out that the maintenance costs on the Cheetah are probably higher than that on the Gripen. “If we can only afford a handful of airworthy Gripens, how many Cheetahs would be airworthy if they were in service?” Darren Olivier supported this question, noting; “I strongly believe that if the SAAF had continued operating the Cheetahs and never acquired Gripens, it would currently not have a fighter fleet.”

Those who argue that the Cheetah should not have been retired, often make the claim that they are still flying in the USA and Ecuador and use this as a reason to justify why the SAAF should not have bought the Gripen. However, the reality is that the Cheetahs never flew in the USA, and Ecuador retired their fleet in 2021.

An interesting comment about the Gripen vs Cheetah capability was that, “It was more about the SAAF equipping themselves for the previous war, rather than fully embracing and committing to the new capabilities they have in a modern package. … the operators have complained about the lack of upper management understanding and appreciation. For example, having a dumb bomb capability is useful, but that should be secondary to the laser guided bomb. Yet it seems it’s the other way around in the SAAF.

“We bought a great product, but are choosing not to embrace it, at least not in the upper brass levels.”

This claimed resistance to fully adopting the latest technology may tip the balance in favour of repairing and maintaining older types, particularly in the increasing evident asymmetric warfare scenarios.