September 24, 2009 at 1:50 am
This is a little old (over 6 months), but it does show a good trend going forward.
Lockheed Martin Expects Unit Cost of F-35 to Reduce
Reprinted from Jane’s Defense Weekly
The unit price of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike
Fighter aircraft is coming in under projected costs, according to
the U.S. project office. Speaking at the Avalon 2009 airshow in
Australia, Maj. Gen. David Heinz, US MC, deputy program executive
officer, Joint Strike Fighter, said on March 10, “Our costs
are falling against cost models and I have better confidence
that countries will be able to buy the number of aircraft planned
within projected budgets.”
“We are looking at a 3.3 percent reduction on low-rate initial
production Lot 2 compared to models and five percent on lowrate
initial production Lot 3 compared to models. We would
expect the learning curve which occurs during the production
process to also reduce costs.”
http://admin.tacticaltv.com/UserFiles/File/NTSAApr09News.pdf
To summarize:
A 3.3% drop in LRIP 2 cost from the projection
A 5% drop in LRIP 3 cost from the projection
Before anyone screams foul, this is the flyaway cost, not development cost.