Proven High Reliability and Good Maintainability

A major goal in designing the Gripen was to provide a quick, easy and flexible maintenance concept to meet today's challenging operational requirements. To achieve this, Gripen provides excellent inherent support attributes such as high reliability and 'testability', along with excellent maintainability and accessibility features for ground personnel.

The substantial body of in-service experience supports these facts and trends predict that the current figures will be improved.

Gripen is the most reliable multi-role combat aircraft available in the world today. Gripen operators can expect fewer failures, less maintenance down-time, and the lowest cost of support compared to any other aircraft in its class. This excellence also extends to maintainability and testability where Gripen's inherent design characteristics deliver not only the lowest-cost initial support package, but also the lowest through-life support costs. 

This has been proven through a cost-estimation relationship model based on acquisition costs and key support parameters, such as mean-time-between failures and maintenance-man-hours per flying hour. Hard data, based on real experience, exists for Gripen from the stringent operational system evaluation program run by the Swedish Air Force. 

Competitor data is obtained from public domain sources such as seminars, internet sites and contractor briefings.  The result shows Gripen’s operational costs are 50 per cent lower than its closest competitor. This is because Gripen is nearly twice as reliable, uses less fuel, is easier to repair, requires fewer personnel, fewer spares, less ground support equipment and less maintenance.

Gripen is designed to be 'care-free' in aircraft handling and very easy to fly. Because of this, the training system can be maximized for system usage (operational use) rather than pure flying training. Gripen´s modern training system enables safe, effective and efficient conversion-to-type training and is flexible enough to allow refresher training to be undertaken and for customers to develop a self-sustaining indigenous capability.