[Charlotte Corday]

Hey Dog,

I'm just a lil ole gal whose only experience with military aviation is watching the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels at air shows, but..... $1 BILLION plus for a single plane?

And that's the F-22, the F-35 certainly has to be more.

Will we shortly get to the point where we only have a handful of planes in the Air Force due to the high unit cost, they'll be GREAT planes, but if only a few of them get taken out we're toast??

[ken5050]

If you could take a ride in one, you'd think it was cheap at twice the price...

[SauronOfMordor]

With development cost amortized over so few planes, it doesn't seem cost-effective.

I'd like to see a whole bunch of SCAM-jet UAVs. I'd like the parameters to be "how good a unit can we get for unit cost $1M, min quantity 10,000?"

[Gunrunner2]

>>$1 BILLION plus for a single plane?<<

Hi.

Cost is a complicated issue because the cost per jet goes down the more you make. Aerospace companies take about 7-10 yrs before a jet comes off the line, and in that time they spend a bunch of bucks. Aerospace companies must recoup their non-recurring R&D costs. . .much like May-tag and washing machines. If May tag only built a couple of dozen machines then the cost per unit would be sky high. Consequently, by cutting the number of jets you raise the cost per jet, and that makes for great hype in the papers but is not a reflection of a) the true value of the jet, and b) where the blame for the high cost should be placed.

Cheers

[rbg81]

The more you buy, the less the unit cost. Its sounds expensive because you're dividing the cost of 23 years worth of R&D over 250 aircraft. To make it worthwhile, you need to buy a lot more. Frankly, its just plain dumb to develop only buy a handful of aircraft when you have a 25+ year acquisition cycle.

BTW--I came into the AF in 1985. At that time, they were doing dem val on the FA-22 (then it was called the Advanced Tactical Fighter). I will likely retire next year and they STILL haven't fielded the plane--think about that.

[XBob]

23 - "Will we shortly get to the point where we only have a handful of planes in the Air Force due to the high unit cost, they'll be GREAT planes, but if only a few of them get taken out we're toast??"

Exactly - like Germany during WWII - they made far and away the best tanks - the Panzers. And we beat them with the far inferior Sherman tanks. The thing is, they built 5,000 Panzers and we built 55,000 Shermans.

They also built the fastest fighter planes, the first jets and the first rocket fighter planes, both far faster than our prop planes, but we beat them with props, by far superior numbers of planes.