[MHalblaub]

“The final costs will be in the neighborhood of $350 million per plane. After all, there is no competition. Why temporize when your congresscritters will do the heavy lifting?”

Reminds me on the Bell ARH-70 program for Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter. Bell won the contest but price increased up to the unit costs of an AH-64 Apache or Tiger. Then DoD finally canceled ARH program. Now Eurocoptor offers the Armed Scout 645 developed from the UH-72 Lakota (unit price of EC-145 is $ 5.5 million) which itself is developed from a B0-105:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBB_Bo_105.

What initial offer do you expect by Boeing?
$215 million per unit (patriotism tax and fuel save tax included)?

[17th Miss Regt]

We call on the Department to keep in mind the economic conclusions of the prior round of bidding as it takes actions to protect the taxpayer when defining the sole-source procurement contract. In the previous round, the Air Force, through a rigorous assessment of our proposal, determined that it would pay a unit flyaway cost of approximately $184 million per tanker for the first 68 tankers, including the non-recurring development costs. With the Department's decision to procure a much smaller, less capable design, the taxpayer should certainly expect the bill to be much less."

The above quote is from the Northrop Grumman press release when they announced their no-bid decision. The last sentence seems pretty reasonable. If Boeing comes in at about $200 million per copy for the first 68 planes I would be not be too surprised. Absent any competition, your $215 million figure might be in the ball park as well. Indeed, I expect cost escalations to occur as Boeing goes through its learning curve.