Confucious,
I'm puzzled why you should want to make up a new price for Typhoon. There are more than enough out there, after all.
The unit programme cost (including R&D) is £82.5 m or £84.78 (Total UK programme cost (there are two credible figures) divided by 232).
The current unit production cost, excluding R&D, has to be less than the price paid by Austria (€62 m).
The cost of Tranche 1 for the UK was £2.5 Bn, covering 55 jets (it's actually 53 aircraft, two having slipped to Tranche 2 to allow for Austria's Tranche 1 Block 5A jets) giving a unit cost of either £45.45m or £47.17m. The NAO 2004 MPR gave a UPC of £49.1m.
The cost of Tranche 2 was £9.56 Bn for all partners, which gives a Unit Production Cost of £40.5-billion. Alternatively, known UK T2 contracts to RR and BAE (some of which had an element of R&D) totalled £5.05 Bn, giving a maximum UK UPC of £56.14 or £55.49m (T2 changed from 89 to 91 jets).
The 2005 MPR gives a UPC of £64.8 m - which is clearly about £20 m above the actual price, above the German/Italian/Spanish and even Austrian prices and clearly distorted by some odd piece of accounting (RAB, perhaps?) or by the inclusion of what should be counted under R&D or through life support costs.
Anyone listening to RonO's optimistic repetition of Lockmart's price targets might be surprised by the JSF unit price of $104m. We should not be surprised at all.
The costs for the JSF system development phase alone have increased by a staggering $13 Bn (from $28 billion to $41 billion) and if you thought that this was not going to be reflected in further price rises, you were deluded. If US politicians and taxpayers know that they are paying $110 m per JSF they were never going to stand for export customers like the UK paying just $83 m (Lockmart's $59 m plus our unit R&D spend of $24 m) per jet. I don't even think that would be legal!
JSF funding and related financing was explored in depth in a recent issue of Defence Analysis, using cost data produced by the UK National Audit Office and used in House of Commons answers, plus JSF price and inflation data from the US Government Accountability Office, and from a “raft of US reports”.
These figures make it clear that while the International Partners' SDD costs have to remain constant and capped there is no such price cap for the production phase, and that the “UPC has risen annually”, and that “the price has continued to increase over the past five years”, threatening fleet sizes, and that the price has already inflated by 36% in real terms.
As early as 2002 the GAO were using a $67 m UPC (excluding R&D), while Lockmart and the DoD were holding to $50 m. There has been a 72% cost rise since 2002, so that the figure for 2006 will be in the order of $86.2-million for the A-model.
The starting price for the UK F-35B is already higher than that, with JSF procurement (exclusive of the SDD phase and long-term support) quoted at £10-billion for 150 aircraft. That was a £66.67-million UPC in 2002, with an adjusted UPC growth to £75.75 m in 2003, £90.15 m in 2004 and £104.6 m in 2005.
It seems as though the latter figure is what we're going to be charged (in addition to the $2 Bn SDD funding we've already committed).
Thus the Typhoon costs about £45-49 m today, and the JSF costs £56 m.
And the vast bulk of Typhoon spending has a positive impact on our balance of payments, and is recycled through the UK exchequer, while the JSF eats foreign currency reserves.
And this was supposed to be a cheap F-16 replacement.....