tphuang said:
there is no way FA-22 only costs 85 mill. The speculated cost right now is 200+.
The 200 million plus price tag is the result of including the research and development costs of the program in the price of each aircraft, and since only about 180 F/A-22s are being produced, that’s an absurdly huge fraction of the total. The actual costs to just build the parts of a Raptor and put them together are around 90 million.
R&D costs in the pricetag are also how you get the 2.1 billion dollar cost of each B-2 bomber, of which only 21 ended up being built. Once more, the acutal production costs where only a fraction of the often quoted figure. Northrop later offed a second run of 21 more B-2's at only about 500 million each, to give you an idea of the disparity, and that was still a much higher price then the bomber would have had, had it seen its entire planned 132 aircraft production run go through. Every single part simply got more expensive to make, since so few needed to be made.
BrotherofSnake said:
I'm surprised that the EA-18 costs more than an EF Typhoon.
That’s because the EA-18 is a specialized electronic warfare aircraft, while retaining the full fighter and bomber capabilities of the F/A-18F its based on. That drives the cost up quite a bit, though the F/A-18E/F is already a quite expensive plane for its size. The EA-18 will replace the EA-6 Prowler is USN electronic warfare squadrons.