Originally Posted by
Just a spotter
£15m seems to be not a lot to get a complex jet aircraft from "mothballed" to air worthy.
The £15M figure dates from 2003, before spares and infrastructure disappeared.
It's now totally outdated, even if some people still quote it.
More importantly, none of the aircraft is in anywhere near a "mothballed" state.
To mothball the aircraft, for instance the fuel system would not just have been drained, but refilled with light oil, to prevent corrosion taking hold and seals drying out.
Also, of course, the engines would have been dropped and fully processed for long term storage as per the maintenance manual, not left under the wings.
Originally Posted by Just a spotter
The Wikipedia (so taken with a large pinch of salt) page on the return of one of the stored Tu-144's to flight for the NASA tests in the 90's claims (without a citation) that $350m was spent. Now that would have included work to kit out the aircraft as a flying lab, and may, or may not have included the costs associated with fitting the airframe with different engines.
Either way, the work would have been done with the support of Tupolev.
The Wikipedia page info is incomplete... a lot more info is on the NASA Dryden pages for the Tu-144LL.
Without looking up the exact figures, the cost of the "flying lab" was about $18M.
The $350M was the total cost of the NASA HST research program.
We don't know what exactly the $18M paid for....
Manhours (design, overhaul, modifications, flight test personnel) would have been billed based on Russian wages.
The main jobs would have been the maufacture of the modified engine nacelles and the installation of the test instrumentation.
The engines were leased from the Russian air force, and returned after the programme was finished.
Maybe spares weren't even billed, since they would have come from Tupolev stores, and after all, Tupolev was keeping the aircraft.
CJ