Originally Posted by SAS
and if Grumman still has the tooling for re-starting the production line again....
Don't bet on it. Lack of similar tooling for CH-46 at Boeing, and cost of restart made the V-22 a more attractive choice in the 90's.
I believe I've pointed this out before, in the first V-22 thread.
To give you idea of what it was gonna cost to reopen the line and start making phrogs again, the opening number was roughly half a billion in mid 1990's dollars. (Granted, we'll never know, as that never got to the end of a negotiation.)
That said, I seem to recall that E-2 is still being made.
Northrop Grumman Awarded $795 Million in E-2D Advanced Hawkeye Contracts (NYSE:NOC)
This suggests to me that Grumman's line is a bit "warmer" than Boeing's was so that an investigation into a C-2 buy, if our friends in the Royal Navy go after Cat and Trap carriers, would be well worth considering.
But I don't think it would be cheap, due to low production run.
My dos centavos, amigo.
