I was curious about this figure and found this site which claims that 517 were lost through enemy action or accidents with 493 ejections. One squadron alone, VFP-63, had 60 ejections!

http://gator.crouze.com/chapter7.html

That list of survivors alone makes the figure of 88% wrong since there are over 200 hundred survivors on there rather than less than 150 that this article says would be left.The Wiki crusader page lists 89 F8D, 136 F8E, 87 F8C and 61 F8B as rebuilt, so perhaps a plane had a major crash and gets rebuilt so looks to have been written off when it hasn’t. Indeed I think some planes could be crashed and written off twice.

Just as a comparison the ‘ADF Serials’ site for the RAAF Mirage shows that aircraft had crashes so bad that they were rebuilt only to crash later and be destroyed. Others crashed and while not destroyed were deemed beyond economic repair and converted to components.

Interesting.