Final approval for the Pilatus PC-7 MkII trainers to be obtained next week after the Cabinet Committee on Security convenes. Finance Ministry’s approval has been obtained for this deal, which basically means its through.

Final approval for IAF Pilatus trainers

“The Indian Finance Ministry has cleared the deal for 75 Pilatus PC-7 Mk II basic trainer aircraft. The deal will be presented to the Cabinet next week for final clearance. Contract signature will follow soon after,” said Indian Air Chief, Air Chief Marshal N.A.K. Browne today. Have tried to get a word out of Pilatus, though the company said it could not provide any information until the contract was signed. The deal is worth $565-million (Rs 2,900-crore).

I wonder what they are doing for the ARM requirement? Presumably both have offered to integrate HARM (don’t know whether ALARM is still in production) which is why Raytheon is happy. It sort of knew whosoever won (apart from the MiG-35) there was a good chance its weapons packages would fly on the winner.

But it does seem more and more that the EF team is really taking this entire competition as seriously as anybody possibly could. They seem to have answers for pretty much all the IAF requirements, and will (if we go by unit costs) be very competitive in terms of offsets and TOT as well.

I wonder what all they have included in terms of radar and EW proposals.

Teer, this Dubai ShowNews article on page 27 claims that the “IAF is discovering that the AESA that is coming along for the Eurofighter will not be as expensive as once thought”

Dassault guys claim that the EADS bid doesn’t include the costs of capabilities that the Typhoon doesn’t yet have and will need, which is not the case with the Rafale- and hence the price difference may be more like 25% as per them.

talking about it, might be “funny”, if india chooses one, the pakistains take the other…

Good luck getting them to pay for the Rafale or Typhoon in any number worth talking.. 😉

bad PR for a fighter being marketed at Dubai..any idea what technical malfunction resulted in the crash?

I think your analysis is a bit tender hearted.

in an ideal world all suppliers will give their reasonable costs and of course no one will be tempted to make some dumping.

The thing is India will be stuck with its supplier for the next 40 years so just relying on manufacturer data for maintenance would be quite foolish. And that’s true for both manufacturer.

Once one of the manufacturer get the deal if maintenance costs are increasing more than expected it will be too late. Perhaps in some specific case you claim some compensations but that’s rarely always the case.

So if they cannot rely on manufacturer’s data then where do you suppose they can make their decision from? Just a hunch that one fighter may be cheaper than the other to operate?

They will be smarter than that and make sure that if figures provided during this evaluation don’t match those when in service, they will have clauses that will insure the IAF. This has happened in the past- for instance the Kopyo radars on the MiG-21 Bison failed much earlier than the manufacturer’s MTBF figures suggested. But the IAF could do nothing about it and the manufacturer wasn’t penalised. This time, things may be different.

An airline company can benchmark operating costs because airliners are somewhat standardized product (most of it) in service with many other airlines. So “datas” are more or less known and the guess work is much less important.

Now how will you benchmark the typhoon and rafale on a 40 years basis ? Aircrafts that are not even operational in their marketed form.

Just one example : Typhoon use a repositionner which is an innovation for a fighter aircraft radar. How do you know what will it costs to maintain and to what extent will you believe Selex datas ? And how can you challenge it ?(note that I could find an example for the rafale as well)

It is simply unfeasible (at least in the given time frame) to challenge thousands of datas from both manufacturers.

virtually all/most datas given by Dassault and the typhoon consortium are very hard to challenge if not impossible. At best you can have a rough idea but it will be very hard to put reliable numbers on each parameters.

I am saying that the guess work part will be so important that you can’t achieve something very reliable, especially that with a 40 years projection the slightest gap with your hypothesis will end up in millions $.

For the particular item (repositioner) the IAF will request Selex to give data and have to make the assumption that whatever data they have provided is fair- there is nothing else that can be done. How else do you think that a life-cycle cost analysis can be estimated? But that is one new product- the AESA. What about the rest of the items ? There are hundreds of parts and both the Typhoon and Rafale aren’t developing them from scratch for the IAF- so they must have some data on how long they last and when they do break down how much it costs to repair them.

So, for all the items, it is the OEM or its supplier (and not the MoD or IAF) which are likely to cook up data and provide it, so how is it political as you claimed earlier? It would appear to me to be the only way in which to estimate which fighter will be cheaper in the long run.

Calculating lifecycle costs is a standard feature of aircraft purchases the world over, and I’m pretty sure that the GoI must’ve been exposed to it quite a bit during Boeing’s purchase of 777 and 787 airliners. Then, seeing how our current fleet of Russian fighters end up being costly to maintain over a 30 year period as opposed to Western fighters, they realised that lifecycle costs needed to be taken into account as well, instead of just cheap upfront procurement costs.

IMO, it is far far better that they do this thorough exercise and then select something, than select something based on purely procurement costs which would eventually end up costing the IAF more in the long run.

About the process of determining L1 described above it is indeed very very complicated.

I know quite well these pricing “exercises” as its one of my field of action in my professional job. I’ve done it on fairly difficult cases but nothing that can approach the complexity of this deal.

By experience as you often lack reliable datas it is a lot “guessing” and establishing “hypotheses” so you can twist the result in a way or another very easily. secondly the horizon time frame of 40 years is another issue because the longer the period the bigger will be the difference according to the beginning assumption which is already a guess work.

I’ve already done cost projections with my company at a 10 year horizon and I can tell you it looks nice on powerpoint presentations especially when backed by people who are looking serious and professional but the hard truth is that there is a lot of hot air surrounding this kind of exercises.

There is no way the cost calculation can be determined precisely enough which leaves a lot of room for political/arbitrary choices despite what is actually claimed.

I don’t agree.

this is the exact method that even companies like Boeing use to sell their aircraft to airlines. There is an element of guess work in all calculations of life cycle costs (which are done for a period of 600 months and include something like 400 cost line item calculations, including all major ATA chapters), but the inputs for those calculations are generally provided by the user themselves- for instance how much they intend to utilize their airplane and what the approximate range of the operations will be. the IAF must have given similar figures to each of the contenders and asked them to estimate their life cycle costs based on that.

Personally, I am quite amazed that they are being so detailed in this tender. THe ‘hot air’ that you refer to is exactly what goes on for all major airline acquisition programs then.

Looks like the Chinook is ahead of the Mi-26T in the heavy helicopter tender..

link to AW article

There have been indications that Boeing’s CH-47 Chinook has also emerged on top against the Russian Mi-26T2 in a competition for 12 heavy-lift rotorcraft for the IAF.