“There is even a stark difference between the UH-60A (at US$6266) and the UH-60M (at US$3956). What could explain these significant differences? In contrast, there is no difference in reimbursable rate for CH-47D vs CH-47F versions of Chinook.”
Those are indeed pretty significant differences, not sure why that would be, other than the UH-60A May have more significant costs associated with airframe condition due to age? Those numbers could be possibly be inflated depending on the timeframe that the information was gathered.
For example, the 9 aircraft (UH-60A) that were initially assigned to the Air Ambulance Detachment I worked at were pulled out of long term storage from bases in Germany, they were all veterans of multiple tours of duty (Iraq or Afghanistan) and required a significant amount of time and cost to bring them up to a reliable fleet.
This kind of effort was repeated across a number of bases State Side as all UH-72A were pulled out of Air Ambulance service and sent to Ft. Rucker to become part of the training fleet there, in around the 2015-17 timeframe.
I think we spent over $1.5 million USD on parts alone on those aircraft the first (partial) year we had them, If memory serves. I don’t know if maintenance man hours counts towards this cost per hour number but that would have been a significant cost in our case due to overtime pay.
At any rate, would be very interesting to know exactly how the cost is actually computed. Of course, there may be a significant amount of smoke and or mirrors involved in these calculations, as anyone dealing with any government entity for any amount of time would know….
FltMech