“I watched a speciel last night on “Modern Marvels” about the B2 bomber.
What a machine.”
It sure is, and we should have built many more than we have. There are billions in sunk engineering costs, and only 18 (IIRC) planes left to show for it.
People complain about the idea of an $800 million airplane, I guess they don’t realize a 747 goes for about $200 million. If we’d built, say, 100 B-2s, the cost would have gone down to about double a 747, a real steal given the advanced technology involved. Plus we could afford to lose a few from attrition or enemy action.
“People complain about the idea of an $800 million airplane...”
And the plane would have cost some $10 billion a copy, if they had built 2 of them.
The idea of criticizing the cost of a program by diving the total cost by the number built ANGERS the hell out of me in these cases, when we never got near going into a production mode.
In fact, had we actually produced even 100 copies of this bird (still a puny amount), the average, per airplane, cost would have wound up being in line with the B51 and the B1, when factoring in inflation. This was not an overly expensive aircraft to produce...but if I asked GM for a one-of-a-kind car model, I’d have to pay well over $100M for that one car.