Dave,
The S-92 did not benifit from Black Hawk experience with regard to certification of development expense, since only a few components are shared between the models, none in the rotor or drive area where the real expense lies.
As a general rule, the certification of a new aircraft seems to take about 1500 to 2000 hours of engineering test. We tend to spend about 20 to 40,000 dollars per hour for this work, so that flight test alone costs about $50 million dollars. This might be halved for a light helo with fewer parts and systems to test and document, but the result, 25 Mill, is still steep. If you sell 1000 of the little guys, the flight test alone would cost 25,000 apiece.
This does not include design, fabrication, production start-up and the like. In the aerospace world, 5 engineers or technicians for a year cost about 1 Million dollars in salary, bennies and overhead (the tools, computers and lab equipment are all expensive, and included in this number). A small helo might take 25 to 50 engineers, and maybe half that in technicians, so a force of perhaps 60 people (8 Million per year) might work for 3 years to design, build, certify, and produce the first aircraft. That is 36 million, or about 36,000 per aircraft if you sell a thousand.
That means that you must spend about 60,000 dollars per aircraft to get the first aircraft out the door, without buying one engine or one pound of aluminum!