WERTH: Lieutenant General Bogdan does not fear a death spiral. He says costs have actually dropped over the past four years. And his goal is to get the F-35's price down to around $85 million dollars each. Although, he says any uncertainty does not help that process.Explain something to me.
BOGDAN: As people waver, it makes it harder for us to project how much the airplane is going to cost. So what we're really looking for is stability.
WERTH: To get that stability, Bogdan says he's here talking to partner countries about what he calls a block buy, which would allow partner nations to pull their orders and purchase F-35s at a wholesale price.
BOGDAN: My incentive to them is if you commit to buying X number of airplanes over five years, I'm going to give you a discount.
WERTH: At the same time, America's allies may not have a choice in the matter. The F-35 is the only advanced, fifth-generation fighter available to replace aging military fleets. And any alternative could be decades in the making. For NPR News, I'm Christopher Werth in Farnborough, England.
The orders from S. Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and Australia were already baked into the cake.
The orders from the US military are too.
But something funny has happened along the way.
The Netherlands cut its order almost in half. The UK are buying far fewer than originally planned. Canada still hasn't made a decision, Singapore hasn't climbed aboard and made a firm buy decision, the Italians are making noise about going even lower than the few they're already buying and no one else seems interested.
Now we have Bogdan talking about block buys of an airplane that hasn't even finished testing.
That doesn't smack of desperation?
This whole thing doesn't have the whiff of a death spiral attached to it?
Why the cost cutting scheme? Why the block buy scheme? Why do any of it if the plane is on the proper cost trajectory?
Its simple. They've crunched the numbers, projected costs and found that unless they get foreign buyers to buy the plane NOW then the future is indeed cloudy.
This "no show" at the UK airshow is a big deal. A very big deal. We're seeing the first death gurgle of this program.
I couldn't be happier.
