Meanwhile... SecDef Gates is cutting funding in most sectors of our military services, including new aircraft procurement. Anyone else miss the F-22 and its superiority? How about reducing the number of surface ships for our Navy? Then there’s Obama’s committment to reducing our nukes.
I’m sure Bell, Boeing and Sikorsky could build an aircraft to accomplish what the Russian aircraft now does. However, as someone else on this thread indicated, the bureacratic red tape that includes stuff like mandatory minority and women owned suppliers, excessive oversight and audits of every stage of development and testing, etc., the US products are extremely costly.
I’m sure Bell, Boeing and Sikorsky could build an aircraft to accomplish what the Russian aircraft now does. However, as someone else on this thread indicated, the bureacratic red tape that includes stuff like mandatory minority and women owned suppliers, excessive oversight and audits of every stage of development and testing, etc., the US products are extremely costly. As someone with exposure to a mil-spec aviation supply house, it is all about cost benefit analysis and risk. Because of all this red tape they are really risk adverse.
Add to this one component you forgot, they might want to dual source the design i.e. also get it FAA certified with a Type Certificate and Production Type Certificate. This is brutally expensive and time consuming.
With that said, is their any question why their isn't a plethora of designs for the various market niches?
It was less 50 years ago now, a firm like Mooney Aircraft was willing to try ( and it failed, they only sold something like 22 of them, it was ahead of it's time) a large 6 seater single that was pressurized, "The Mustang". No one has the capital, or quite frankly the b@lls to try something like that today given the regulatory environment. And they wonder why we don't "make" things here anymore...
