Showing posts with label Joint Strike Fighter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joint Strike Fighter. Show all posts

Friday, June 7, 2013

Bean counters are loading the dice (beans)

The Pentagon has a problem.  Cost of the new F-35 fighter is so high that overseas customers are backing off.  It's a nice airplane everyone agrees, but they just cannot afford it.  One of the budget busters, after paying the list price for a new fighter, is the cost to fly it, Cost Per Flying Hour.
   Despite their best efforts at cooking the books, it looks like the F-35 will cost $24,000 per flying hour.  Which adds up quick. And you have to fly it if you want it to do any good.  Pilots need about 10 hours a month to stay competent in such a high performance, complicated machine.  Figure to have maybe two, maybe three pilots per aircraft, and you get to 360 flying hours a year, or $8.6 million dollars a year per airplane.  It doesn't take many years for operating costs to exceed the purchase price.  And any experienced person will figure the $24,000 per hour to be a lowball estimate.
  So, to make things look a little less bad,  the Pentagon is inflating the cost per flying hour of the current workhorse fighter, the F-16.  This is also a good airplane, everyone, including the cost-no-objective Americans, flies it.  The Aviation Week article did not give the before and after F-16 estimates, but they did quote several people expressing surprise that such a thing would be changed.  The F-16 has been flying for over 20 years, we have real numbers going back a long time, and altering them comes pretty close to lying.