PARIS --- The Saab JAS-39 Gripen and the Dassault Aviation Rafale, with a unit price tag of around $65 million each, are the least expensive Western fighter aircraft currently on the market, although they differ markedly in size, weight and number of engines.
Surprisingly, Rafale’s cost to the French government is lower than the cost of Gripen to the Swedish government, the study shows, even though Rafale is substantially larger than Gripen and has two engines instead of one.
At $ 95 million, the Boeing F-18E Super Hornet, which is not a new aircraft but a redesigned F-18 Hornet, is substantially more expensive than Gripen and Rafale, both of which were designed and developed from scratch.
The Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Eurofighter Typhoon, at over $ 100 million per copy, are markedly more expensive while the Boeing F-15E Strike Eagle, from which are derived the F-15K sold to South Korea and the F-15S sold to Singapore, costs about 10% more.
The Western world’s most expensive fighter remains the Lockheed Martin F-22A Raptor, costing more than three times as much as JSF and Typhoon.
These are the main conclusions of a study “Sticker Shock: Estimating the Real Cost of Modern Fighter Aircraft” by Defense-Aerospace.com, and based on unclassified data published by government auditors and parliamentary sources.
The report is intended to provide an objective basis for estimating the true costs of combat aircraft at a time when manufacturers, locked in increasingly bitter competition on the export market, routinely inflate the cost of competitors’ aircraft while making demonstrably misleading claims about their own.
In fact, the costs as calculated by this study differ substantially from the ones publicly quoted by the various manufacturers. In some cases, this is due to different definitions of what is included in a price, to different rates of value-added tax, or to how R&D costs are accounted for.
In many cases, however, the differences are due to “creative accounting” intended to distort true prices to gain competitive advantage, and the very complexity of the issue makes it unlikely that the media will devote sufficient time and energy to confirm or infirm prices quoted by manufacturers.
The study also compares aircraft prices using various benchmarks:
- exchange rates at Purchasing Power Parity;
- prices per kilo, compared to luxury goods;
- prices as a multiple of Gross Domestic Product per head.
It also publishes a one-page analysis of the costs of each fighter aircraft included in the study, explaining how the authors arrived at the prices quoted, with direct links to the documents and sources.
Click here to access the report (13 pages in PDF format)
-ends-
Sticker Shock: Estimating the Real Cost of Modern Fighter Aircraft
