According to an article regarding the RAAF purchase in this mornings Boeing News, there are 5 remaining C-17s that are not spoken for.

Don't know about that last statement. C-17s can get into just about any airfield a C-130 can get into, while delivering more than 4 times the relief supplies. And a really small airfield is often a poor choice for delivering supplies. How so? Small airfields are also austere airfields and without security forces in place, the aircraft could get overrun by desperate locals. Achieving and maintaining security is a huge deal in such an operation.

End of the line
 

According to Boeing News, the final C-17 left Long Beach yesterday. It flew to the Boeing facility in San Antonio and will be delivered to Qatar Emiri Air Force in early 2016.

Left for San Antonio, the check-out and maintenance depot. According to AW&ST there is one unspoken for white tail still in the hangar there.

Boeing Ends C-17 Airlifter Production in California | Defense content from Aviation Week

"....LOS ANGELES – Boeing closed out C-17 deliveries and seven decades of aircraft production in Long Beach, California, with the departure of the last airlifter for the Qatar Emiri air force to the company’s San Antonio facility on Nov 29.

The final aircraft is one of four C-17s that will be delivered to Qatar in 2016, and together with one aircraft that remains unsold and in storage in Texas, takes the overall production tally to 279. Not including the prototype, structural test airframes and the five undelivered aircraft, Boeing has so far officially delivered 271 C-17s, including 223 to the U.S. Air Force and 48 to international operators....."

Could HMG, or PPRuNe [UK], have a whip-round to buy the White Tail?

When it hits the fan, as it always does, we never have enough assets.

Considering all the costs and troubles involved in developing new airplanes (e.g., C-17, A-400, KC-46...) it's a shame that, once sorted out, these costs are not amortized over a much larger fleet. Seems to me like such a waste not to.

Global, I believe the original plan was for 220 aircraft and they built 279, so at least it's not like many military programs where the development costs so much there's no money left to pay for the planned production run (F-22 and B-2 come to mind, with the F-35 a likely candidate).
Besides, if there was a demand for more aircraft, there's been plenty of opportunity for potential buyers to step up.

With short-term politicians, platforms remaining in service for decades and spending profiles stretching way out into the future, there is a very valid concern that we have no credible way to keep our aircraft manufacturing windows inline with military demand cycles.

There will be demand for many more C-17s over the next decade or two, but no economic way for commercial manufactures to meet it. High-rate and efficient production runs are great for civilian products, but not for the peaks, troughs and uncertain funding profiles of military procurement.

Two comments:

1. San Antonio is not a "check-out" facility. San Antonio does heavy maintenance and mods and do check-out only to ensure airworthiness immediately prior to final delivery to the customer.

2. Ship 272 is the only unsold C-17. It is stored outside in a "preserved" state, not inside a hangar.

Got it. San Antonio does not do 'check-out and maintenance' it does 'maintenance and check-out'.

Thanks for clearing that up Ken.

:ok:

The Douglas C-X proposal in 1981 was for a 210 aircraft buy. FSED (Full Scale Engineering Development) contract award was in 1982 and C-X was designated C-17 at that time. Planning was still for 210 aircraft. Although Douglas won the competition and was granted FSED authorization, no funding was authorized till 1985. Douglas floated the program on internal funds during that period. It nearly wiped them out and robbed them of funds for commercial aircraft development. The T-45 Goshawk (carrier capable BAE Hawk Mk. 60) was also in development in Long Beach at that time and while it was well funded, it absorbed a lot of engineering and other limited resources.

I understand where you're coming from, but taken to an extreme it would mean we'd still be building C-141s and flying around KC-135s - oh wait :E
The C-17 is already fairly old technology - the engines (the F117 is really just the military version of the PW2000) date to the early 1980s and the airframe the mid 1980s. Most commercial aircraft from that vintage have either gone out of production or gone through at least one major redesign in that time frame. Further, military aircraft don't get anywhere near the hours/cycles that commercial airlines do and last much longer.
Eventually there will be a need to come up with a replacement for the C-17 - and yes it will be expensive. But it'll likely be a far better airplane due to the technological advances in the meantime.

OK, so they only planned for 210-200 tails. Still. The bird is a workhorse, like those which came before it. As a tax-payer I'd just like to continue to take advantage of the lower risk of equipping with a proven airplane, that is very capable. No longer an option now, but in my opinion, a short-sighted decision.

I know I'm stepping into a discussion I'm not really qualified to be in but, I can't help but think of the C-130 (J) and how it has been transformed with upgrades whilst still maintaining the reliable work horse platform. The line is closed so it's a moot point, but there is precedent.

(Now, if only someone could tell me why the B52 was never re-engined...) :p

Short sightedness. Every time a proposal was floated to re-engine the B-52, it was pointed out that project xyz was going to replace all the B-52s, so new engines would be a waste. But none of the new projects ended up actually replacing the B-52.

The worst re-engine waste was arguably the re-engine portion of the C-5M upgrade.

The C-17 is a wide-body airlifter, the 141 and 135 were narrow body. It's going to be really tough to significantly improve on the C-17. Yeah, you can go to an all composite wing and more fuel efficient engines, but the result will likely be a relatively small incremental improvement over the C-17. The A400 makes use of modern airliner tech, but applied to a military airlifter the performance improvement has been incrementally small. What's driving airliner improvements is fuel efficiency. Fuel efficiency is a low priority in the military world.

As an example, take the KC-46. It's based on the 767 which is OLDER than the C-17 (first flight was in 1981, the same year the C-17 proposal was submitted.) That "old tech" airframe still works GREAT and will continue to do so for decades to come. Modifying the new high tech 787 as a tanker will be much more difficult because it is a single point design very finely tuned to a very specific mission. Along those lines, it will be interesting to see if Airbus will be able to modify the A330NEO as a tanker. To make the A330 competitive will require much more than just mounting new engines. Once the fuselage is tweaked and stretched and longer span wings added, it will be interesting to see if it makes sense to go to all the effort and expense to modify and certify it as a tanker when new-build KC-46s will still be available.

I read recently that Airbus plans to avoid that issue by continuing to manufacture the 'Classic' A330 to serve as their tanker platform even
after the NEO enters service.

There is a New Standard A330 'green' aircraft for new customers' MRTTs; it is not based on the A330neo.

But with the emergence of the A350XWB, it is likely that redundant A330 airliners could be converted into a 'lite' MRTT configuration for 'price sensitive' customers, as was the case with the A310.

Several years ago, Boeing themselves admitted that it would not be possible to develop the 787 into a tanker as it didn't have the 'necessary configuration', whatever that was supposed to mean.

So the future still looks like A330MRTT or KC-46A only - although the KC-390 might have some limited potential, much the same as the KC-130.

Wow. Are they going to keep two parallel lines running, one assembling the A330CEO and the other the A330NEO, or are they going to try to produce both the CEO and the NEO on the same line?

Already happening - the extra 2 recently announced for RAAF are to be converted from ex QANTAS A330's.
Whether they are 'lite' I cannot say, but the impression at the announcement was they would be to same standard as first new build RAAF aircraft.