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by blahpro 1565 days ago
Nothing compared to loss of life and suffering of the Ukrainian people of course, but: this is sad.

From the article: "It will cost over USD3 billion to restore the plane [...]".

This seems extremely high. I'd expect maybe high hundreds of millions. I appreciate that they're hardly like-for-like, but the A380 unit cost was something like $400M, which I think has maybe double the tonnage of the An-225. Where does the extra couple of billion come from?

2 comments

The A380 is $400m per plane coming off a production line. The total programme cost for the A380 is something like $30bn.

There was only one An-225 built, and it was built 34 years ago. Presumably the tooling and much of the manufacturing knowledge is long gone. Antonov as an aircraft manufacturer was barely a going concern before all this - it's fallen a long way from its Soviet heyday. They haven't built a single aircraft since 2016 - and I can't imagine having a battle fought at your main facility helped things.

Making one of something always costs a lot more than making many.

No production lines versus relatively high volume manufacturing.