F-35 purchase price will average $178 million per plane in FY2015

[unhappycamper]

http://www.autoblog.com/2014/08/04/f-35-purchase-price-average-178-million-per-plane-fy2015/



F-35 purchase price will average $178 million per plane in FY2015
By Brandon Turkus
Posted Aug 4th 2014 9:02AM

With all the problems and delays facing the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, critics of the program have had plenty of ammunition at their disposal. Now, they're about to get one more figure to lob at proponents of the plagued fighter – its cost. Now, we know the F-35 program itself is very pricey – the latest reports claim the jet has already cost an eye-watering $400 billion over the course of its development so far. The latest forecast for the unit cost, though, isn't a much more encouraging sign.

According to Winslow Wheeler, a staffer at the Project On Government Oversight, each individual jet should cost between $148 million and $337 million in fiscal year 2015, with an average per-unit price of $178 million, DoDBuzz reports.

"This data is the empirical, real-world costs to buy, but not to test or develop, an F-35 in 2015," Wheeler wrote on blogging site Medium.com. "They should be understood to be the actual purchase price for 2015 – what the Pentagon will have to pay to have an operative F-35."

Wheeler, who counts stints working on security issues with the Senate and the Government Accountability Office among his accolades, unsurprisingly expects the conventional takeoff and landing variant employed by the Air Force – the F-35A – to be the cheapest of the plane's three variants, at $148 million.


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F-22s cost $418 million per copy; $337 million puts this POS into the same territory.

[TexasProgresive]

1. Does that take into account all the money spent developing this POS? n/t

[unhappycamper]

2. We are using the Design As We Go (DAWG) to develop this thing.

The concept is 14 years old and we've already given Lockheed Martin $40 billion or so for the 100 or so aircraft sitting on the ground somewhere. The original plan was to product 2,449 jets for $400 billion dollars. (That number has decreased

Not much works on this thing. Angle of attack problems, lack of self-protection problems, weather related problems, engine problems, wing problems and my favorite: vision related problems. It seems the $250 grand brain bucket that originally came with this thing had some serious latency problems. Our new $500 grand brain bucket may work better.

Think about it: $500 grand for a lousy pilot's helmet for a lousy aircraft..

And of course:

[unhappycamper]

3. Here's the article on the new brain bucket:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/magic-helmet-for-f-35-ready-for-delivery/

[TexasProgresive]

4. Thanks, unhappycamper, for keeping us in the loop.