The UAE deal is $80m per plane.

$50-60 million is the price for the Block 60 airframe and avionics, probably weapons too, according to what I read. Basically, that’s its “flyaway.” The other $20 million per plane is for the maintenance, spares and other services.

What constitutes a “flyaway” price isn’t entirely set in stone. The best way is to look at deals and proposals and determine the per plane price from there. Offsets and ToT, of course, confuse things a bit.

But in the UAE sale and the Polish Block 52 proposal ($70m per plane), there were no manufacturing offsets.

jwzjwz2003cn: Then can you stop posting pics from 1yr ago? It is very annoying.

It seems he goes out of his way to get the oldest stuff as well as the Photoshopped stuff 😀

Very strange.

Great, great work, Usman, to get the JF-17 avionics project director!

The aircraft will also be equipped with IRSTS, CLDP, and Helmet Mounted Display to provide all weather operations capability in all types of environments.

This is must be the Chinese avionics package mentioned in the Janes report.

The eventual cockpit description sounds like a F-18 🙂

Confirms a highly open design. He repeated 2006 as the date for the PAF’s first planes. Very ambitious date but it is the one they’ve pushed in all the recent reports so they have better meet it.

Sounds nice but as mentioned already, politics. In the case of how the U.S. does FMS ( foeign military sales ) the annoying thing isn’t always unit cost ( which can be a red herring ) but who and how it is paid for with 2 or 3 different colors of money, and then the cheap 0 interest loans where it applies and the “offsets”. I don’t care if an F-16 costs 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 million. What I care about is how all the money is laundered back and forth to give it the apprearance of a conventional sales deal, where you have a vendor and a buyer. Which just doesn’t seem to be the case.

At some point, the company involved, Boeing, Lockheed. CAC, etc. needs to get paid. The selling nation’s government could make deals, but either they subsidize a sale for political reasons or alow the company making the plane to sell for a profit. In the US’s case, they could often do both depending the need.

The Block 60 deal with UAE is about as close to a vendor/buyer scenario you could come. The Arab Emirates aren’t looking for offsets. The transactions of $80m for plane, weapons and spares are pretty straight forward here.

OTOH, the C/F-18 deals with Canada and Australia are messy ones with lots if offsets. Add money for initial delivery, add license fees for components contracted as parts of offset deals, substract money spent for capital equipment by the buying country to build parts, subtract lower labor cost, etc. Countries with offsets end up with an even more inflated price per plane but they are also paying salaries to their own people in the buy price with the offset deals. The buying nation also hope that investment in the parts lines would result in work for other F-18s sold by the US further in the future.

The JSF would involve negotiating the mother of offset deals 😀 Instead of bilateral negotiations like Dutch F-16 or Canadian CF-18, the JSF is attempting to work out deals on who makes what proportion of what parts on how many planes.

Norway is already complaining that it’s not getting enough of the work.

Mate I was only saying in general to give it a rest, it wasn’t directed at you persay, as for knowing what’s going on in the world, I’m all for it, but not at the expence of casting aside real issues just to post a few hundred pics of something, one or two are fine, but like in the case of Golden Dragon, hundreds are really not nessecary that’s all

That’s the dumbest, most idiotic thing I ever heard. You dislike people for posting pictures instead of “real” issues? What the flying f*ck are real issues? We’re all enthusiasts here.

I post hundreds of pictures alright and they’re confined to one or two threads (usually marked as picture heavy) that you can avoid if you so chose. And I almost never repeat pictures (unlike the picture in this thread that was already in the J-10 mass production thread.)

As for the naval thread. One, I was one of the earlier particpants in it and I had pumped the thing full of pictures from the very start. It made that thread popular in a goddam aviation forum. Two, the recent HK trip was an major event.

Ja, if you don’t like pictures, stay the f*ck out of my threads and I’ll stay out of yours 😀