How about THIS ..... EXPENSIVE playtime!!! Outside the US, Boeing is pursuing at least nine potential foreign customers, although not all of them all of them have committed to buying any new aircraft, let alone show a particular preference for the F-18 family: “Brazil, Malaysia, Canada, Denmark, Kuwait” – which already has older-model Hornets — “[and] several countries in the Mideast that we don’t discuss by name,” Gibbons said, and he has hopes the Australians will buy more planes on top of their recent purchase. Win even a few of those sales, he said, and “at 24 [planes] per year that gets you beyond 2020 easily.” (Australian officials have said publicly they do not plan to buy more F-18s.) The line currently builds 48 jets per year and is headed down to 36 (which was, not coincidentally, the maximum number in the withdrawn solicitation). It can go as low as 24 before it becomes uneconomic. As you lose economies of scale in ordering supplies, said Gibbons, “our practical minimum is two jets per month.” At that rate, and buying a year’s worth of aircraft at a time instead of signing a bulk-buy “multi-year procurement” contract, the price of the jet Boeing delivers (which doesn’t include the engine) will rise from the current $37 million to somewhere closer to $40 million. (A complete Super Hornet, with engine and electronic warfare gear, currently costs about $51 million, he said, while a fully equipped Growler costs about $60 million). breakingdefense/2013/12/navy-cagey-boeing-cocky-over-f-18s-future/
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 15:27:27 +0000
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