Considering the development budget is split among a handful of prototypes, the F-35 series are currently the most expensive. That will change once it enters series production.
That, or the copy editor is an idiot.
Considering the development budget is split among a handful of prototypes, the F-35 series are currently the most expensive. That will change once it enters series production.
That, or the copy editor is an idiot.
You are correct, and it used to infuriate me when they gored my own personal ox in the process of publishing accounting illiteracy. The first prototype of a plane is fabulously expensive, viewed - properly - as embodying all the design cost of model. All that $$ buys you the first prototype - the first prototype and the ability to make subsequent aircraft of the type at a more-or-less reasonable cost. But that form of accounting requires you to be realistgic about the fact that the money spent to design and build the prototype, once spent, is "runway behind you, or altitude above you, or fuel used." That money, already gone, has no bearing on whether it makes sense to build the next one, or in general what production rate makes sense. So the first prototype cost a great deal of money to build - but its replacement cost is simply the cost of construction of one additional plane.From that POV the development of the F-18 was a foolish choice. There was no case that the plane would be superior to the existing Navy aircraft - it wasn't even designed to be as good, it was designed to be cheaper to produce. And yet the cost and the technical risk of the development should have predominated in the balance against the (putatively higher) production cost of the F-14, the development cost of the F-14 being a long-sunk cost and thus irrelevant to any current decision. Instead, journalists and Democrats (redundancy) insisted on calling the unit price of the F-14 the total cost of the program divided by total build. An accounting procedure which would always favor paper tiger new designs over the continued construction of a known-quantity design. IOW, it makes "better" not only permanently at war with "good enough," but permanently triumphant over good enough. Meaning, you will never have anything but paper tigers and no actual equipment.