Check out this article from Business Week.
“The cost of an F-35A in 2019 will be somewhere between $80 and $85 million, with an engine, with profit, with inflation,” U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, the Pentagon’s manager of the program, told reporters in Canberra today. “The important thing about that is when you can start offering a fifth-generation airplane that rivals fourth-generation prices, you’ve got a pretty good airplane.”Excuse me but WHAT THE FUCK!
Australia, Japan and Israel are among nations that have placed orders for Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT:US)’s F-35, the Pentagon’s most expensive weapon system, which has been beset by rising costs and technical troubles, including jittery images in the pilot’s helmet. The Pentagon has repeatedly questioned the plane’s progress, finding in January that the fighter wasn’t sufficiently reliable in training flights last year and its complex software system was causing difficulties.
The Pentagon has projected a price tag of $391.2 billion to build a fleet of 2,443 F-35s, a 68 percent increase from the projection in 2001, measured in current dollars. The number of aircraft the Pentagon plans to buy is 409 fewer than called for originally.
The F-35 development program, which has an end-October 2017 completion date, is running four to six months late, mainly due to software complexities, Bogdan said. Other problems remain in the reliability and maintainability of the aircraft, he said.
“From a schedule standpoint, up until 2016 I’m pretty confident,” Bogdan said. Beyond that, “things get a little fuzzier,” he said.
How in God's name is this guy quoting a price of about 50 million per airplane (because he included the price of the engine which is about 25 mill) in 5 years????
The trajectory of the program indicates no such thing! We're still waiting on the fix to the bulkhead issue, the design has yet to become stable, the F-35C still hasn't landed on the carrier etc...
It has to be because he's in Australia and he's desperate to get the Aussies to sign on the dotted line. So any line will do as long as it works and gets good publicity.
80 million a piece? Bogdan needs to get drug tested.
F-35A engines currently run at about 12-14m, and will never get below 10m. But still, Bogdan's estimate is a wildly optimistic price, even if it is understood that the price he quotes does not include all the necessary support costs to actually operate the aircraft beyond the ramp at Ft. Worth. What is even more outrageous is that he includes inflation - even the program's most outrageous supporter, Loren Thompson (who has be very quiet lately, after an flawed attempt to compare F-35 cost to Super Hornet) uses FY12 base year dollars in his estimates (which understate the cost needed to buy the aircraft in current dollars.)
ReplyDelete"with inflation"? Yeah, like anyone can accurately predict inflation that far out. I would like to see what inflation rate he figured into his calculation. Of course he gives a figure of five years out and not a figure of what it costs today.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Wikipedia (if anyone has a more accurate figure please correct me) a Super Hornet 2012 cost was 66.9 million. I figure today I could get more Hornets at less cost than the F-35 five years out.
Super Hornet current URF is about $53M. URF is not really representative of the actual cost of fielding an aircraft, but the JSF tribe has adopted this cost as legitimate, and uses it to vastly understate the true cost of the F-35.
DeleteDuh, Sol, it's easy to get a 80M price tag.
ReplyDelete1) From 2015-2019, recoup all your R&D costs by making the buyers pay through their noses for a product they must have because they committed themselves believed LM bullshit a decade back.
2) Once you gouged your partners and paid off all the R&D, offer a chopped rate F-35 with missing pieces.
Viola, cheap F-35 with no R&D costs.
PS: I think the article said 80 million, not 50 million. Let us just be generous and assume he was using USD.
Meanwhile, in Italy, potential cuts loom
ReplyDeletehttp://www.defensenews.com/article/20140312/DEFREG01/303120043/Italy-s-Defense-Minister-Says-Military-Programs-Could-Reduced
The 2,443 aircraft figure has been set in stone for about forever now and everything is based off that, not whatever earlier estimates there were.
ReplyDeleteBoeing is only going to build 600-something Super Hornets and they got the flyaway cost down to something less than $70 million per aircraft according to whatever cost calculations they use. Look past R&D and EMD costs for a second. With a production run in the thousands why shouldn't Lockheed be able to build this for an $85 million flyaway cost? Does that cost factor in what the actual rate of inflation is likely to be however? Unlikely.
LM bullshit Daniel? This was Congress' and the DoD's ingenious "do-everything" idea. And those Boeing figures also don't factor in the support stuff you need to buy with the Super Hornet like you do with any other aircraft.
The bulkhead issue you're fretting over isn't the same critical bulkhead issue that occurred earlier in the program. These bulkhead cracks occurred on the airframes second simulated lifetime. At 9,400 simulated flight hours. Do they need to fix it? Yes, because they are required to by the contract and because it is likely that many F-35s will get SLEPed someday. They also have to provide a large safety margin. Does it mean the program is doomed? No. Those aircraft built prior to the fix won't get anywhere near 8,000 flight hours for a long time.