yes, but what he asks is the attrition rate (meaning, how many real aircraft lost, not mission aborts)

I think that Mildave thought more of “france” rather than just dassault as “one of the rare “complete aircraft” producers outside USA”..

if one looks around the world, there’s basically three countries doing so:

– USA
– Russia
– France

all others rely on international partnerships or imports or “more or less licensed” parts to build theirs

to be honest, it would take a bit more than just the intake widening.. the whole air duct would need a larger section, so a good chunk of the airframe and its aerodynamics would need to be redone

no wonder they don’t want to invest in it oif there’s nobody wiling to pay for it 😀

@ spitfire9:

when the deal for the rafale was made initially, it was cold war, and the market for french aircraft was quite significant (if anything, the french forces were supposed to buy a higher number of airframes, which, by itself would have reduced the costs per airframe), and many nations had sufficintly high defense budgets to afford a good number of airframes.

that is the situation in which dassault had agreed with the french state over the deal

then came 1989 and the end of the cold war. the defence budgets shrinked to ridiculously low levels compared to what they previously were, and, as a result, orders were reduced/delayed, and the potential markets did the same.

now dassault has, as I said in a previous post, something like 7bn dollars to recover and it can’t expect to sell 2-300 airframes on top of french orders like with the mirage 2000. as a result, they have to make that money with lesser aircraft, and that gives a higher price per airframe. it’s not considering customers as idiots, as they’ll have to pay similar amount or higher for any new airframe. If they want an airframe that’s a 40 years old design when they integrate it in their service) then they buy an f-16 (or eventually an F-18 which would be “a bit modernised 40 year old design”) with all modern electronics (hopefully), and get a cheaper thing. if they wan’t something newer, be it the f-35, or typhoon or the rafale (not many other contenders anyway with similar capacities), they won’t get anything cheaper before 2020, and maybe even after, and they know it full well.

Something wrong with your calculation, I think. Why should the customer repay Dassault for the costs of development paid by the French government? I presume your figure of airframe price for the french forces is about 147 million dollars/frame includes development costs paid by the state.

147 millions is the overall price when you divide what the french government will have paid when all the airframes will have been bought. the customer should pay dassault only for the part of development investment that dassault made, not the part already paid by the french govenment

If Dassault prices too highly and loses deals, they won’t get any of their development expenditure back on those lost deals, will they?

and i fthey sell it too low, they’ll have to sell an unsellable number of airframes to get the money back. at 150 million apiece, they’d need to sell about 90-100 airframes in export to get their investment back, which may be reached between the few potential customers. put the price at 117 million (UAEs offer) and you have to sell something like 180-200 airframes to break even… where will they sell them?

besides, we can talk all we want, the typhoon, with most of the features besides the a2a unfinanced yet can’t get even close to that price (somebody will have to pay for the developments, and the europeans are broke… so, what do you think? how many billions will UAE spend just for the development of the typhoon so that it reaches their level of expectations before buying a single airframe?

and his next sentence was just as clear:

Not exactly, Rafale is good enough for India right now and in time according MMRCA requirements, while EF offers only the future potential to be good enough for India, if India pays for the upgrades and with delays.

So what you are indirectly implying is that
a) EF, both in its current or future configuration will not meet IAF requirements, ever.
b) IAF is incompetent/unwilling to evaluate the aircrafts properly and EF should not have made this far or somehow the evaluation process was heavily loaded to give EF an advantage during evaluations ?

he said very clearly:

EF isn’t ready now, and may only be through promised upgrades in the future for which somebody still has to pay the price

$10 billion for 60 Rafales may not bring a profit ? What’s it made of ? Gold ?

er, I’ve read that dassault came down to 9bn in its offer, but UAE proposed only 7.

9bn gives you, more or less, what they get for rafales they build today for the french forces, so, accepting a lesser price instead (the french orders would be delayed in the process) would reduce the cashflow they already get… not necessarily interesting for them