Thanks, I’m keen to give it a read. While I do, why don’t you provide me with any issues you have with the way the Danes assessed the capabilities of the different platforms?

I really hope I won’t need to once you have read it. look at the offsets, and training clauses.

Well Well Well

Teal Group analyst Richard Aboulafia also expressed skepticism about the Danes’ pricing information for the Super Hornet. Boeing could have priced the Super Hornet for future years when the production line is dwindling, and asked for more overhead to cover the cost of keeping the line open — but that explanation is not likely, he said.

It’s also possible the decision was politically motivated, Aboulafia noted.

Even Richard Aboulafia blushes when the trying to explain away the result..

Sorry, I haven’t seen credible arguments against the report.

You have Boeing stating that the costs assigned to their product were 50%-100% inflated…. So Boeing are not credible as the producer of the item in question.

Re the German auditors report On Eurofighter maintenance costs, its a pity they didn’t use the any of the other Eurofighter air forces costs, Germany’s were inflated by their insistence on using the old style maintenance program and not carrying the recommended number spares, guess who’s changed their maintenance program.

So guess which set of costs the Danish picked!! That’s why the report is discredited.

Simulators playing almost no role LOL isn’t the same as playing no role……. they added air frames for it while the F-35 didn’t, did you read the reason why?

Have you read the full report?, what do you think of the caveats, are there any you think are bias?

How can one say “fair evaluation” and “F-35” in one sentence is beyond me.. :confused:

I just wonder how much does it cost to make the whole committee use completely falsified figures and not care, at all..
As said before, a random bunch of guys from this forum would have made a more qualified decision

It rather depends on which random guys ;-)….

Anyhow onto the discredited Danish report.

It does seem to have blown the argument out of the water regarding “accurate costing” 50-100% more expensive isn’t an accident, If you read it the caveats they are quite astonishing.
And the fact that they ignored the usual costing for the Eurofighter in favour of the 2014 German reports on it being twice as expensive to maintain… and the fact that the Eurofighter simulators have software around 1 year behind the latest software version means you add more aircraft because you cannot use the simulators! apparently something the JSF would not suffer from LOL.

There does seem to be a certain amount of cherry picking going on there, I would go as far as to say the whole frikken orchard has been stripped.

Finally the last bit about how they worked out offsets and industrial transfer is laughable…

Apparently the fact that the JSF doesn’t do offsets and it is done on ‘best value’ contracts, isn’t a problem, so there is no guarantee of work for the Danes, but this scores higher and is less risky than guaranteed offsets.:rolleyes:

Its quite an accomplishment to get a report published and then discredited in such a short time..

Okay, so you didn’t actually read it. From the article
Of course it is going to cost more if you operate the jet for six further years.

Your missing the bit about flying them less ~300hrs to ~250hrs… 17% less flying per year stretches out the planned maintenance and should reduce costs including a 17% reduction in fuel. your looking at an increase of 11% in flight hours (Source page 92 SAR 2016), you should see a net saving, see down below for reasoning.

Try these figures From the SAR reports operational costs FY 2015 were $597773.6 ^ FY2017 are $620805.4 we are not seeing a decrease.

Pretty sure there are newer figures available than those. Will see what I can find.

http://fas.org/man/eprint/F35-sar-2016.pdf

Irrespective, right now you have a metric of 31% above F-16 operating costs for a smaller fleet of immature aircraft in three or even four different LRIP configurations with still 20% of the test and dev phase of the program to go, compared to an in service aircraft, with all the knowledge, baseline, history, support base and understanding that comes from operating a platform that long.

I have never claimed the 10-15% are today’s costs. The F-35 number is coming down, it has continued to come down and will continue to come down and that is the expected cost to operate the jet, I believe in 2019 but will have to check that timeframe.

Its a pity you didn’t claim that – You will find the Average Annual Cost Per Flying Hour have decreased to those sort of figures, but only because of the lowering of the flight hours per year and a 6 year increase in lifetime, those sort of things really help with that average figure, I’d expect to see 25% increase on those figures without those 6 years..

Read page 92, you’ll find the relevant details on the current cost ‘savings’ by including reducing the price per gallon of fuel from previous estimates, and using ‘contracted values’ instead of analogy and parametric estimating :highly_amused:
Simply put they only count the contracted values and not estimate the cost by comparison with previous projects or estimate against a set of fixed criteria, that means if it isn’t contracted yet it doesn’t count.

but the salient point is

The 2015 CAPE total O&S estimate is approximately 3.8% higher (in BY 2012 $) than the total O&S cost estimate in the 2014 SAR.

Note the rising cost, also note the following:-

The reliability information has been compared to expected reliabilities for this stage of the program, for all variants, based on reliability growth curves. The 2015 CAPE O&S estimate continues to reflect the increased DLR costs present in
the 2014 SAR estimate, because component reliability information obtained from actual flight operations data remains inconsistent with expectations.

Now that’s interesting, the reliability isn’t meeting the expected reliability due to the learning curve, this is especially relevant when you read on.

In the future, the use of actual flight operations information could result in substantial changes in forecasts of DLR costs in CAPE O&S estimates.

Hmm so they are not meeting the current estimates and it will result in substantial changes to the costs, care to guess which way the cost will go?

In short – Just listening to Bogdens sound bites will give you quite a different perspective that looking at the detailed figures on F-35 costs and progress..

Cheers

The commonality between F-35 is small ~30%, your in effect getting 3 fleets of dissimilar aircraft so don’t go counting all those F-35 in one.

While Concurrency issues will plague (cost) the F-35 for the next decade, its the maintenance cost that have risen that is a concern.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-lockheed-fighter-idUSKCN0WQ2GD

~additional 10% on the already 1.5 times the cost of ‘legacy’ fighters and much more for the C and STOVL.

Remember these costs are best estimates of LM….. and I think you know how that works out.

Interesting to see that the prices are on par with the recent Rafale deals, only differences would be ground infrastructure, training, weapons packages.

So there isn’t a vast gulf in prices (see what I did there) 🙂

Also, for the record, the F-35 isn’t just better than the Eurocanard at Day 1 strikes, its equivalent or better at nearly every role,

I’d be very interested to see what facts that’s based on!.