Forum: Program and politics

Turkey to buy two F-35s in 2012: minister 12 April 2012, Reuters,

http://english.alrroya.com/content/turk ... 2-minister

"Turkey, which said in February it intended to buy 100 of Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jets, will buy only two this year, and will decide each following year how many planes it will order, Defence Minister Ismet Yilmaz told Reuters....

..."We will evaluate and decide each year the order size within this frame," Yilmaz said.

Yilmaz had told the parliament in February that Turkey planned to buy 100 F-35s in total, but other partners had reduced orders due to rising costs and delays in the project....

...Yilmaz also said the cost of an F-35 would be around $120 million for Turkey, much higher than a cost estimate of $40-50 million calculated in 2002."

All of it at the jump for context read.

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ACK, I HATE when people get their costs mixed up, don't account for inflation, and fail to put them in context. Bang Head

SpudmanWP wrote:

ACK, I HATE when people get their costs mixed up, don't account for inflation, and fail to put them in context. Bang Head

You're absolutely right.

$120 million apparently isn't significantly larger than the $63,275,000 they had anticipated in 2002... both figures are in 2012 dollars.

I do hate it when people try to use inflation to explain away why something costs over twice as much now as they had estimated ten years ago. If inflation were REALLY that bad, an overpriced fighter would be the least of our concerns.

WRONG.

The original estimates of $63 mil (fy2012) were for the AVERAGE Flyaway for the entire production cycle. The $120 quoted above is obviously includes more than just URF, so no, they are not talking about the same thing.

Early (2002?) estimated average cost are of no use - other than as a reference of what the plan was a long time ago - nowadays. These estimates (numbers built, ...) were based on the assumption that the JSF was going to be an AFFORDABLE (read reasonably cheap) plane. In the meantime the project has been hit by one thing: cold reality (schedule, cost, ...).

In my opinion it would be more honest to keep project cost (what the US and other countries are willing to pay) constant and then find out how many planes you can get for that much money. Would this mean a considerable increase in per-unit cost? Probably (or should I rather say definitely).

Is it really? What did an F15 (Typhoon or Rafale) cost in 2000-2002 and what does an F15 cost in 2012? The price of a house and wages in 2000-2002 and in 2012?

Not to forget the F35 in fact are three different jets. When the combined costs are seen as separate (development) costs per F35A,B and C the F35 is an affordable cheap aircraft.
Replacing these jets, F15,F16, F18, A-10 etc. by developments per jet type would have cost that much money this wouldn’t have been possible.

Would be interesting when someone has figures of all the types, flying costs per hour, the F35 will replace in the US Airforce and US navy.

Wouldn’t be amazed the combined average flying cost per hour of these jets are a lot higher than the estimated $30.000 -$35,000 flying cost per hour of the F35?

SpudmanWP wrote:

The original estimates of $63 mil (fy2012) were for the AVERAGE Flyaway for the entire production cycle. The $120 quoted above is obviously includes more than just URF, so no, they are not talking about the same thing.

The $120 quoted above IS the flyaway cost. It DOESN'T include more than just URF, so yes, they are talking about the same thing.

You're wrong.

They explicitly stated that they anticipated the price of the F-35 to be in the $60 million range. The actual price they are paying for these two F-35's is $120 million.

Now supposing that the jet does miraculously drop to the $60 million range at the end of its production life, that doesn't change the fact they're paying more than double what they had anticipated today. That means in order to come to an AVERAGE price of $60 mill, the later fighters will have to be significantly less than that to balance it out.

Fanatical supporters of the F-35 have to admit that LM resorts to "smoke and mirrors" accounting and accounting terms quite frequently. Nobody knows how much the F-35 costs (or will cost) and LM seems to be happy about that.

It would be MUCH easier to support the F-35 if the program didn't have the look and feel of a financial fraud and con job, and right now--I'm just being honest here-- that's EXACTLY what it looks like. Best evidence: Look at what's happening to the Canadian government right now. They got caught flat-footed in an unending series of bald-faced lies about the true cost of the F-35. Talk about being hoisted upon your own petard--but they deserve it.

Everyone knows the cost of the F-35 has gone dramatically up. And everyone knows that the cost will continue to go up--probably dramatically. AND it is VERY obvious that LM has a concerted, coordinated, systematic and premeditated plan to deny, deflect, disregard and defuse those facts.

Al

battleshipagincourt wrote:

The $120 quoted above IS the flyaway cost. It DOESN'T include more than just URF, so yes, they are talking about the same thing.

I'll have to throw a BS flag on that play.

The current LRIP FY2013 URF estimate is $118 million for the F-35A, so the URF is already below $120. If Turkey adds to the FY2013 order then the price will drop even more.

Quote:

They explicitly stated that they anticipated the price of the F-35 to be in the $60 million range. The actual price they are paying for these two F-35's is $120 million.

You are doing EXACTLY the thing thing that pisses me off, mixing an average URF estimate (the $60ish price) with the cost of only two LRIP F-35As.

NOBODY ever told ANYONE that the projected average URF would be the price that they pay for EVERY jet they buy, especially the early LRIP buys. It's called AVERAGE for a reason.

Quote:

Now supposing that the jet does miraculously drop to the $60 million range at the end of its production life, that doesn't change the fact they're paying more than double what they had anticipated today.

Again, nobody anticipated that they LRIP jets would be the same cost as the AVERAGE URF price and to think otherwise just proves that there are FOOLISH people in the Turkish procurement offices (if that is what they really thought).

Quote:

That means in order to come to an AVERAGE price of $60 mill, the later fighters will have to be significantly less than that to balance it out.

Not really, since the vast majority (>80%) of the F-35s to be built will be FRP jets, the prices do not scale evenly.

The reason that the FY2013 jets costs much as they do sit that the US DOD chickened out on their Concurrency plans and it is not adversely affecting early Partner buys.

Quote:

You are doing EXACTLY the thing thing that pisses me off, mixing an average URF estimate (the $60ish price) with the cost of only two LRIP F-35As.

NOBODY ever told ANYONE that the projected average URF would be the price that they pay for EVERY jet they buy, especially the early LRIP buys. It's called AVERAGE for a reason.

I just don't get it..
Why does the LIRP F-35A price tag allways float up in every god damn estimate cost prospect??
It is of no interest what the LIRP price is these days.. If it is so hard to calculate an avarage price some 3 years ahead, then this program is in deep water. I mean consider how many years LM has spend developing this jet allready.

It's going up primarily because the USG keeps delaying the orders. Short term pricing is VERY hard to calculate when the US keep gutting the orders.

SpudmanWP wrote:

I'll have to throw a BS flag on that play.

The current LRIP FY2013 URF estimate is $118 million for the F-35A, so the URF is already below $120. If Turkey adds to the FY2013 order then the price will drop even more.

Seriously you should go back and retake remedial mathematics.

So I was off by about two million dollars... that's substantially closer to $120m than $65m you F-35 fans keep vaunting about. These two F-35's are coming in $55m over Turkey's projected budget each.

SpudmanWP wrote:

You are doing EXACTLY the thing thing that pisses me off, mixing an average URF estimate (the $60ish price) with the cost of only two LRIP F-35As.

No I'm not. You are making the claim that the average price of the F-35 is going to be $65m, which means that the cost of producing the aircraft is going to have to drop substantially and very quick, otherwise you're pretending the LRIP aircraft aren't coming in at nearly twice their projected cost. You cannot just write these off as dropped cost, because averages have to take EVERYTHING into consideration.

Unfortunately you're in no position to be stating the F-35 will hit that vaunted $65m flyaway cost because the entire program has failed to meet every budget and schedule projection thus far. Why should we expect the current estimates to be any more accurate than past ones?

And no, I'm not expecting EVERY F-35 to cost what the LRIP aircraft are going for now. Once the fighter is in full production, the flyaway costs will go down. However, given the program's history thus far, I'm highly skeptical that the F-35 is going to average out at $65 million a piece.

SpudmanWP wrote:

NOBODY ever told ANYONE that the projected average URF would be the price that they pay for EVERY jet they buy, especially the early LRIP buys. It's called AVERAGE for a reason.

You're right, which means the F-35's flyaway costs are going to have be considerably LESS than $65m in order to compensate for the higher-than-expected cost of the LRIP aircraft.

SpudmanWP wrote:

Again, nobody anticipated that they LRIP jets would be the same cost as the AVERAGE URF price and to think otherwise just proves that there are FOOLISH people in the Turkish procurement offices (if that is what they really thought).

Again, the LRIP aircraft are costing considerably more than they had anticipated earlier in the program. They were estimating something closer to $100m than $118m, which likely means the full rate production aircraft will likely also be higher than they had predicted. Maybe average unit prices will be something closer to $80m than $65m, but that's still considerably higher than what the program was supposed to go for.

SpudmanWP wrote:

It's going up primarily because the USG keeps delaying the orders. Short term pricing is VERY hard to calculate when the US keep gutting the orders.

I wonder why that would be... maybe the F-35 is proving more expensive than they had anticipated and are cutting orders because they can't afford as many as they had wanted. And that in turn means fewer F-35's are built and the average unit price increases... creating a positive feedback loop.

unFREAKing believable that you would think that an LRIP jet should cost the same as the FRP price when you are only building 19 (as opposed to the FRP build rate of 200+ in a single year).

SpudmanWP wrote:

unFREAKing believable that you would think that an LRIP jet should cost the same as the FRP price when you are only building 19 (as opposed to the FRP build rate of 200+ in a single year).

I see you need some work with reading as well.

Quote:

And no, I'm not expecting EVERY F-35 to cost what the LRIP aircraft are going for now. Once the fighter is in full production, the flyaway costs will go down.

I happen to have good reason to believe that the F-35 production won't go for $65m a unit because virtually EVERY budget and schedule goal has been missed by a considerable margin.

Had the F-35 program met more of its cost estimates or at least delivered their product on schedule, I wouldn't have reason to doubt their future estimates would be any different than their past ones.

Here are some links regarding how actual F-35 costs are being hidden or blatantly changed to make it look better.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2 ... ml?cmp=rss

http://rabble.ca/columnists/2012/04/con ... andal-last

http://www.defensenews.com/article/2012 ... 35-Program

How can you say

Quote:

These two F-35's are coming in $55m over Turkey's projected budget each.

and still say that you don't think that the LRIP jets should cost the same as FRP jets.

If Turkey "truly" only budgeted $65 for their first two LRIP jets, then they are "truly" fools for not knowing the difference between LRIP and FRP production.