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by 2trill2spill 897 days ago
Umm each plane cost way less than 1.7 Billion. A F35A can be purchased for around $80 million. The 1.7 trillion figure is the cost of research & development, purchasing about 1700 aircraft, and sustaining them for 57 years. So that includes fuel, spare parts, upgrades, pilots, etc, for almost 60 years.
2 comments
nocoiner 897 days ago
To further elaborate on this, it’s something like a few tenths of total GDP over that period.

Now, depending on how you look at it, you can consider that either a huge number or eminently affordable - I think both are true - but I think it’s a reasonable price for the roles the aircraft is designed to fill over that period.

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randcraw 896 days ago
The cost of each product must include a host of costs that fall outside of the simple manufacturing cost of each. These costs are myriad: R&D, engineering, tooling, maintenance program development, documentation, testing, re-designing, etc, etc. Thus the only fair assessment of the cost of each aircraft must be calculated as COST_OF_PROGRAM / NUMBER_OF_AIRCRAFT.

This phenomenon has been discussed ad nauseum when pricing the development cost of a new pharmaceutical drug. ALL of a pharma's annual corporate research and development costs must be divided only by the number of new drugs that year. Only THAT accurately accounts for the actual cost of developing each drug, given the number of drug candidates that fail during gestation.

Military hardware is no different. Many bids on new contracts fall through. That expense is part of the cost of doing business w/ the military. In fact, if all of Lockheed's many expenditures (productive and unproductive) were divided by the number of its shipped products (w/ cost proportionate to sale price), the actual cost of each shipped product would be substantially higher than is reported. This is an age-old game played by every government contractor to hide the true extent of how much each of their products finally cost the taxpayers. (Not to mention the practice of hiding the high fraction of cost-plus contract overruns in that business.)

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