[Mr. Silverback]

How about we just buy 10 a year for the indefinite future? When a better plane is available, buy 10 of them instead.

Ten a year is not only not anywhere near enough, it would also drive up the cost of the individual aircraft--Over the course of the purchases, the taxpayers would get all the pay of low-volume buys and none of the savings of buying and flying fewer jets.

[gridlock]

So, how many would be an appropriate number per year?

At what volume does the cost go down?

Is one of these numbers completely out of range with the other? It seems to me, with my limited knowledge of the mechanics of aircraft production, that twenty aircraft a year would keep a factory pretty busy. Producing a lot more than that would mean ramping up production and incurring additional costs.

Since tanker aircraft are something that we are going to need, year in and year out, for the indefinite future, it seems that it does not make a lot of sense to buy them in bunches. We should buy them at a rate that they are economical to produce, that meets at a minimum the replacement rate required to maintain appropriate force levels.

If I ran an aircraft factory, and was not interested in taking advantage of the situation unfairly, I would think that a steady government contract for a certain number of planes a year would be the cheapest way to produce aircraft, since I would build that number into my base production figure. I would have a nice steady production schedule with no need to hire or fire cyclically, and could design my production scheme around known inputs and outputs.