I don’t think the calculation will be very difficult at all. What’s difficult is to collect all the necessary datas, check it and then take arbitrary hypothesis to establish a model. It’s difficult in the sense that it is impossible to be 100% factual and scientific even if you want to be as un-bias as possible. This kind of exercise is no “rocket science” it’s a “guess work” which leave a lot of room to manipulate the results. The processing part is fairly basic but time consuming.

These projections are very rarely reliable. to make a comparison today its rare to see firms making budget at more than 3 years because of the uncertainty of their environment, and those firms know their market and business perfectly…

So making a 40 years prediction about a one shot deal with a lot of unknown elements like both aircrafts are not operational in their new standard is very dubious especially in such a short time frame. It looks as if it will be used as a “pseudo” scientific/objective reason to justify buying the rafale or the typhoon.

article :

Rafale: the UAE put pressure on France

Les Echos, Nov 13

Abu Dhabi has asked Eurofighter, the European competitor of Dassault aircraft, a commercial proposal with a prompt return. A tactic to bring down prices as we approach the moment of truth, according to Gerard Longuet. [french MOD]
[…]
Gérard Longuet, the defense minister, was more prolific. “We are in the final stage of well advanced negotiations. The slightest frown can yield hundreds of millions of euros, “he said to some French journalists. “The nature of trade between the UAE and the manufacturer is such that a request for a cons-offer is part of the business tactic. “Everyone is in his role”, he summarized. Still confident of a positive conclusion by the end of the year, the Minister announced a dream of an announcement on December 2, UAE ‘s national day, and-incidentally- Auzterlitz victory day .

A key moment in negotiations

About a year ago, the same type of information had caused quite a stir since Abu Dhabi had contacted Boeing for details on its F-18. No further action. Same pattern as today with Eurofighter for what looks like a big deal to effectively pressure on the French side. Formidable negotiators, the Emiratis are trying to bring down the bill at a key moment in negotiations on the Rafale, especially as they have never tested its European competitor.

Among the last remaining points up, face, according to our information, the issue of co-development of a new generation of Damocles pod designation of targets, a major Rafale equipment manufactured by Thales. Abu Dhabi dangled the possibility of buying off the shelf the “Sniper” of Lockheed Martin. This would mean that France would have to find several hundred million euros to fund this program alone. “I can not imagine that blocking the sale of 60 Rafale for that,” said yesterday one warned observer .

The other element that campaigns for a bluff in yesterday’s announcement is of course the question of the resumption of 60 Mirage 2000 Abu Dhabi. Resale of used weapons of this type is decided at the highest level between the state who sold and who bought it. Since this is a French equipment, it is hard to imagine that the three nations in the Eurofighter program, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy- get involved. In recent days, the rumor suggests that Mirage could land in Libya in next years, the time that the Rafale will be delivered. If of course, the sale is concluded.

Well either it appears from the beginning that there is a big gap between the two aircrafts in terms of operating costs either this exercise will become a nice quagmire !

just imagine the thousands of data that you need to collect for each manufacturer. Then you need to ask you whether these datas are “realistic” or not because you don’t want that both manufacturer “dump” their prices to bag the deal and then you are stuck with your supplier for the next 40 years … That’s a very very time consuming work with a lot of exchanges to request further information.

You also need to make some real “Crystal ball” hypotheses to assume what will be the future costs and how to value them comparatively for each competitors…

Costs projection on 40 years will just give you a rough idea at best but with a lot of uncertainty.

Also the models to project you costs is quite an arbitrary decision…

In that kind of exercise those anonymous clerks/civil servant who work on those projections have an immense power as their assumption will determine the winner. Why ? Because probably no one except them will dare to take a hard look in their work. It will be so complex that unless you have months of free time ahead of you and you have a real die hard motivation to recompute the work you will just listen politely to their powerpoint presentation and think “they must be professional so it must be true”…But the truth is that these projections is more often than not true “black boxes” that only those who computed them can explain and that’s not even always the case.

anyway 6-8 weeks time frame to compute this work is an unrealistic time frame for this kind of work. That’s why if their is no obvious difference it will be a political decision. (I don’t know who it can favor).

Or UAE negotiators are really tough ! Lets remember the M346 deal negotiation outcome.

article

French Push Hard to Clinch Jet Deal with UAE
Medialine.Org, Nov 10

First foreign sale for French jet may go to Arab nation

Fresh from battle experience over Libya, a French Rafale jet is heading to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to strut its stuff amid a heavy pitch to finally clinch a deal for the first foreign sale of the fighter aircraft.

The sleek Rafale, built by Dassault Aviation, is expected to fly at the biennial Dubai Air Show, a five-day jamboree of top aviation, defense and aerospace executives, which begins on Sunday.

French officials have recently hinted that they are currently wrapping up their determined efforts to sell the UAE 60 Rafale combat jets in a lucrative deal reportedly worth over $10 billion. French Defense Minister Gerarde Longuet said last week that there was “a very high probability” that the contract would be completed. “It’s a significant deal for this country,” Longuet said on France’s LCI television. “When you equip an air fleet, it’s for 40 years, so the buyer sets his conditions.”

Announcement of the deal could come during the Dubai Air Show, which usually serves as a venue for publicizing aviation agreements. The Emirates deal is critical for the French since they have invested so much political capital and effort in the sale that they have just dispatched to the UAE Gen. General Jean-Paul Paloméros, the chief of staff of the French Air Force, for a final push.

The UAE has been in talks with Dassault since 2008 over the purchase of 60 Rafale jets, and if clinched, they would be the first export sale of the multi-role fighter. This would be a crucial breakthrough not just for the manufacturer but for France as well.

“The French are interested in expanding their security relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states because it sees itself as a regional player on par with the United Kingdom and the United States. So you’re seeing a big push from them,” Theodore Karasik, director of research at the Institute for Near East Gulf Military Analysis, told The Media Line.

The Dubai Air Show comes at a time of aviation industry turbulence, as airlines struggle with higher fuel prices and a sagging world economy. But big civilian aircraft orders are expected to be revealed at the air show, which is also expected to draw tens of thousands of visitors and promises to be bigger than the one in 2009.

Boeing plans to show off its 787 Dreamliner in a debut appearance in the Middle East. It also is bringing its military aircraft, including F-18 and F-15 fighters, C-130J transport planes and Apache attack helicopters.

No one knows the value of the Middle East arms market, because many sales are never reported and ones that are publicized may never go through. But Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI ) estimates that the UAE and other Gulf states alone have agreed to buy some $123 billion in arms over the next decade.

In the midst of the UAE negotiations with the Dassault, the Gulf federation turned to the U.S. defense company Lockheed Martin to buy its F-16s instead of the Rafale. A decade ago, the UAE made one of the largest aerospace deals in Middle East history when it ordered 80 F-16s, worth about $7.3 billion. The F-16s were a version technically more advanced than those used by the U.S. Air Force. The UAE also started negotiations with Boeing for its F-18 Super Hornet.

The French badly need an export win for the Rafale in order to showcase its military competence and help pay for the aircraft’s production costs, which could explain their determined efforts to undercut the American offer.
“All fighter jet sales are political. This one is taking extra time because it’s a slow negotiation process and there are other aspects rumored to be associated with the deal,” Karasik said, alluding to reports of missile sales and satellite links.

The new jets are to eventually replace the aging French-built Mirage 2000-9 fleet of fighters, purchased in the 1990s. As a sweetener, France has reportedly even offered to buy back the Mirage fleet.
The lucrative market for military aircraft sales in the Middle East is currently ripe for deals as many of the Gulf’s air forces are in the throes of modernizing their fleets. A deal for the French here would be a feather in their cap and likely help get their foot in the door.

for the record :

An additional satellite is on the UAE’s shopping list…
SatNews, Oct 31

The United Arab Emirates has reopened negotiations with France regarding the acquisition of a military surveillance satellite that would allow the Gulf Arab nation to monitor Iranian activity. Talks between UAE and France regarding the satellite may be tied to a larger $10 billion defense deal involving the purchase of 60 Rafale combat aircraft from French manufacturer Dassault Aviation. UAE interest in a military surveillance satellite was originally channeled into a larger Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-led effort known as the HudHud program. That program involved Franco-Italian firm Thales Alenia Space Co. producing a radar-optical observation satellite as part of a Saudi-Qatari-Emirati military surveillance satellite system, but the project was dropped in 2008. The UAE now seems eager to revisit the effort on a unilateral basis. […]

You are assuming quite a lot here and I notice that you repeatedly avoided the most important part “Typhoon pilots know better”! In your effort to defend “your” pilots and trying to add some credibility to the utterly ridiculous and false claims which are easy to debunk as I have done in greater detail in the Typhoon thread you are loosing yourself in an ignorant mode of denial.

That’s a matter of point of view (actually I was thinking the same about you although I would not call you an ignorant) and to date I have never read a clear denial on both pilots declarations.

Anyway I don’t want to begin a flame war with a poster that I respect… Perhaps better to move on, everything as been said.

I am not going to start an endless debate to know if the difference is significant or not. I just believe there is a difference and that difference is important enough to be noticed by rafale pilots. that’s all.

I mean everyone and there mothers are complaining about those “evil unnamed industry sources”…For once we have two pilots with solid experience that starts making an analysis after an actual confrontation and certainly many other exercises. We also have a specialized press article. I am not saying it should be taken as god truth but trying to dismiss this information completely is a bit too much.

scorpion, I was probably not clear enough and I acknowledged to Tmor that when I said MMI and was thinking “sensor fusion” as the information was more fused on the rafale giving a clearer view of the tactical situation. I recall at least one article which said that foreign test pilots prefered rafale MMI. I’ll post it when I have time to google it, probably tomorrow.

There were another capatin Romain intervention and I was thinkig more sepcifically about this one and the comparison is quite direct :

When the radar is not used, the missile can use the OSF (a TV camera coupled with a laser rangefinder), the information provided by another aircraft via the MIDS, a heat source detected by the OSF or a MICA IR, or finally a localization by SPECTRA. Faced with these sensors, stealth is useless and we know, thanks to our tests ,that our missiles are very effective in such context.

from grandclaudon :

The Typhoon were inferiors.

Concurrently, November 16, the Rafale gave, according to the french pilot, a memorable beating to the RAF Typhoon – the most recent version – which were also deployed in the UAE for the ATLC. To put it bluntly, Lieutenant-Colonel Grandclaudon said the two air battles – battles with IR-guided missile and cannon – which opposed Rafale and Typhoon gave a score of 7 wins for the first and 0 for the second, the only Rafale considered as having been destroyed flew below the allowed flight floor ! Obviously this statement has immediately raised an outcry among British pilots, relayed by the media and the Anglo-Saxon specialized blogosphere, including claims that the Typhoon did not fly as such during the fighting, but simulated “red” attackers, MiG-29 and Su-27 in that case. So, the 1/7 Provence squadron leader made a point to recall that 2 of his Rafale were also”red chest” (MiG-29 index “Charlie”) when they shot down 4 “blue” Typhoon – flying as Typhoon – while being reduced to use virtual russians AA-10C missiles to be guided by the Rafale until the impact on their target, which forbade to shoot multiple targets at once . For Fabrice Grandclaudon, the limitations of the “red” plastron role don’t prevent a weapons system to show its real capabilities, because the pilots are taking advantage of the real human-machine interfaces and sensors on board, one of the Rafale has benefited from a refresh of its tactical situation by his teammate via Link-16. In other words, even if some of them simluated Su-27, the British pilots virtually shoot down were using the sensors and the avionics of their Typhoon and not those of a Su-27! And the french pilot to recognize, with great sportsmanship, that the Typhoon pilots who had been opposed to the Rafale the week preceding the ATLC were young and relatively inexperienced, as the French already benefits from lessons learned from 3 operational detachments in Afghanistan (one year of presence in all) and 4 of its pilots had participated in Red Flag 2008.

Some advantages that make the difference.

However, he heavily emphasized the performance of the french system in the field of arms data fusion, from his point of view the main reason of the superiority obtained. Instead of each sensor to display its studs (aircraft detected) on a specific screen, forcing the Typhoon pilot to operate an intellectual gymnastics , annoying in combat stress, to check if the plot of its corresponding screen of electronic warfare was or was not the one visible on the radar screen or IRST, the Rafale’s systems present to the pilot a single plot on a screen, the system automatically compares the plots provided by the various sensors on board and decides if it is or not the same plane. The french pilots have also appreciated the agility of the antenna of the electronic RBE2 radar – The Typhoon has for now only a mechanical antenna – allowing to refresh the situation in the whole volume monitored. But they insist, for close combat, on the perfect controllability of their Rafale, thanks to the excellence of FBW, to the extreme limits of the flight envelope.. To point the nose toward the target and to design it to the weapons system in the absence of a viewfinder-HMD while operating at very low speed. What are not necessarily capable of the main opponents of the Rafale …
Well obviously, one should not rejoice in excess. The extremely positive results of these meetings have been obtained in special circumstances. The pilots had been set specific roles by the commander of the COMAO device and were therefore not free to exploit in depth all the potentials of their weapons system. The results have been different perhaps in other circumstances (nevertheless, some time ago, another meeting between Typhoon and Rafale, in Corsica, was also turned into “massacre” at the expense of the first 8 losses to 0 ). But, simply put, the EC 1 / 7 pilots are particularly satisfied with their stay in UAE. Their demonstration has , aptly, made a strong buzz [noise] among the aviators of the region and troubled the Anglo-Saxons until now convinced of the utter superiority of their planes. A disturbance also compounded by the loss – virtual of course – of an F-22 gun shot by an UAE Mirage 2000-9 flown, this time, by a French experimented pilot. Really, when everything goes wrong … P

again the comparison is quite direct.

I’ll have more time tomorrow to answer the next messages.