Cost of operating aircraft…
Its a nightmare trying to get anything sensible and to be perfectly honest, I suspect the answers that are given have a degree of ‘variability’ in them so even when released as part of a Parliamentary Answer I would still treat them only as guidelines.
The MoD doesn’t publish externally its rates but when asked as part of an FOI Request or Parliamentary Answer then you can piece them together.
The full rate includes more or less the kitchen sink and as I said above, will be averaged out over the fleet. So the Typhoon, which is still coming into service and therefore front end cost loaded over a smaller fleet will look very expensive, the £90k per hour figure a few years has since dropped down to £70k an hour.
The marginal rate that sometimes comes out of the woodwork is for consumables and fuel.
These are the result of stitching together various MoD and Parliamentary answers etc so not official but reasonable for a guideline
Tornado GR4, £35,000
Tornado F3, £43,000
Typhoon, £70,000
Harrier GR7/GR9, £37,000
Apache AH1, £42,000
C17, £42,000
C130J, £12,000
C130K, £10,000
E3D Sentry, £33,000
The marginal rate appears to be roughly the same no matter what, so an Apache will cost roughly the same per hour as a Tornado, about £5k an hour!
There is also a rate for the Hawk T1 at between £6k and £10k per hour depending on whether they are flown by the Red Arrows, the Royal Navy or the RAF and before anyone jumps on that, the Red Arrows are the cheapest and the RAF training T1’s the most expensive but only because that cost includes simulators that the others use as well.
This illustrates perfectly why comparing operating costs for different aircraft is almost impossible
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