An Illustration of Just How Expensive Military Jets Are

[unhappycamper]

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/12/spike-aerospace-s-512/



First Private Supersonic Jet Promised in 2018 — For $80M
By Damon Lavrinc
12.30.13
6:30 AM

For billionaire executives, a 16-hour flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo is just too damn long to spend out of pocket. The Spike Aerospace S-512 promises to cut that time in half, and it won’t cost more than a measly $80 million.

The Boston-based Spike crew is made up of former Airbus, Bombardier, and Gulfstream engineers, along with a handful of entrepreneurs and investors that have set out to create the world’s first supersonic private jet.

Their goal is to create a new breed of business aircraft that can reach a cruising speed of Mach 1.6 (1,218 mph) and a top speed of Mach 1.8 (1,370 mph). At those speeds, the S-512 is theoretically capable of flying from New York to London in less than four hours, all while carrying up to 18 passengers in the opulence they’re accustomed to.

It’s no accident that Spike is quoting flight times over oceans and not the continental U.S. — the FAA prohibits supersonic flight over land, with few exceptions. But Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and even NASA have been working on ways to redesign supersonic aircraft to reduce the boom when breaking the speed of sound, but to no avail.



unhappycamper comment:

* B-2, $2.2 billion dollars a pop
* B-1B, $318 million dollars a pop
* F-22, $418 million dollars a pop
* F-35, $243 million dollars a pop
and on,

and on,

and on.



Personally, I would rather see our discretionary funding going towards useful things like housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, hiring teachers and firemen, taking proper care of veterans and fixing our failing infrastructure.

[MADem]

1. And then, there's millions to train the bus drivers to fly the things...

All those costs are under the PERSONNEL side of the defense budget, not the hardware, logistics or r/d side.

[unhappycamper]

2. Yup.

Another (big) expense is the Cost Per Flying Hour.

IIRC, the CPFH for the B-2 bomber is around $35 grand an hour. How many times have we sent B-2s from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri to Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever.

[MADem]

3. It adds up in a hurry...! nt

[flamin lib]

4. Don't know about you but

that's sort of pisses me off.

[jeff47]

5. 'Cause commercial is the 8th or 9th attempt on performance improvement.

The military figures out how to "push the envelope" with aircraft. That's hard, and expensive.

Long after they've worked out all the details, those details become available to "commercial" market. For free. Instead of massive R&D costs, the commercial market just has to work out how to plug those details into a commercial design.

To put it another way, making the X-15 was pretty hard. Making the Concorde after that was pretty easy.

It would be better if we funded such improvements through a non-military environment, but that just won't pass Congress. R's are dead set against it, and too many DLC types on the D side. So expensive warplanes move aeronautics forward.

[Orrex]

8. That's a point that can't be made often enough

because it completely destroyes the "we built this" meme so beloved of those rugged individualists who reap huge profits with relatively little risk after decades of largescale government investment.

[pangaia]

12. OH, but that would be--socialism !!

Can't have that, can we.... :&gt

[november3rd]

14. Ahem ... hate to break it to the Right Wing Authoritarians... but

Without socialism, you can't even have MONEY!

[pangaia]

16. HA HA!! They will NEVER understand what you just said....

[reACTIONary]

25. Good one! I'm going to make use of that! (nt)

[CFLDem]

18. +1000

[reACTIONary]

21. And pushing the envelope...

...means making the plane do things a civil plane never has to do (like evading another such plane) under circumstance a civil plane never has to endure (anti-aircraft fire.)

And then there is the little thing of being able to fly through the radiation burst of an atmospheric nuclear detonation and still have all of its "fly-by-wire" systems fully functional. Oh, and do that twice.

[jeff47]

23. You'd be surprised how the military tech can end up in commercial

For example, military research on wing design is part of why there are wingtip canards on civilian planes now. They aren't on military planes because they interfere with the military plane's performance. But the military did look to see if they would help, and those studies were the basis of commercial studies that lead to the new wing designs on commercial planes.

"Condom wiring" (part of the nuke protection you mentioned) probably isn't going to show up in a commercial plane, but some of the EM research that created it may show up in commercial avionics as commercial planes start to roll out wi-fi and cell phone use.

Little like how radar research created the microwave oven - there often isn't an obvious military->commercial path before the research starts, but that doesn't mean a path won't become apparent later.

Again, it would be nice to do this research without the military component, but that's the way to pay the bills. That huge military budget in the OP contains the vast majority of "pure research" spending in the US.

[reACTIONary]

24. True! (nt)

[L0oniX]

6. 57% = who is winning the war on terror? They are!

[SCVDem]

10. 57%

What are we protecting?

A decaying country with ghost town cities and infrastructure collapsing.

A nation of poor and struggling who will revolt from within before anyone would even think of taking us by force.

A nation of Honey Boo Boo and Duck Phucks who believe a magic book written by uneducated ancients over science.

This is not worth 57%.

[november3rd]

13. Is there anybody here who'd like to wrap the flag around an early grave?

I'd like to ask him what he's trying to defend ...
I'd like to ask him what he thinks he's gonna win!

--Phil Ochs

[marble falls]

7. Good find! I started to get PO'd about the executive jet. Then I saw the money wasted on the .....

military jets. Great find! Thanks a mill .... a billion!

[Aviation Pro]

9. First off....

....it doesn't take 16 hours to fly from LAX to NRT (11.5 is average) and I've heard the same line of bullshit from billionaires who have a "vision" of personal supersonic travel since 2001. Basically, these asswipes try to convince investors that they have a "new" and "unique" wing design that will dampen the wing buffet and therefore reduce the sonic boom associated with transonic speeds (this is where somewhere on the wing the speed of the air is traveling between 0.8 and 1.0 Mach, supersonic speed is not achieved until above 1.2).

News flash, NASA already had a wing design for this, paid for by the taxpayers, and these fuckwits are just playing the marketing game to get people to pony their money for this engineering nightmare. If I were king of aviation, I would tell these billionaire shitstains to go pound sand up their ass and get their own skin in the game.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

11. Some of these turds remember when the riff raff were taking Greyhound,...

....while the wealthy were part of "The Jet Set".

Now the general public travels by airbus.

Being it the front of the bus ain't enough. Gotz to rise above them again with something to brag about.

[pangaia]

15. Very interesting..

Not so much the time from LAX to Narita, I've done that quite a few times.
BUT.. the engineering part-- My ex-wife's husband is an aerospace engineer in California. (we are all good friends.) I won't say for which company he works, but the guy is brilliant and seems to know all the inside shit--50 years old and does things, as he says, 'the old way.' He talks about how all these 'young whippersnappers' think they know everything about engineering but really don't know crap.

He has the highest respect for NASA and the reasons it was started, including for the training of highly competent, honest engineers with integrity, and regrets the politics that has almost destroyed the agency.
He gets pissed off at the mere mention of Space X, for example, and Elon Musk, who, he says, basically steals everyone else's ideas, hires young, often incompetent engineers, threatens them with being fired if they find problems they actually want to fix, and is just in it for the money.

Anyway, I trust his opinions and his brilliance, and it seems to blend with your comments...

[Aviation Pro]

17. Don't get me started...

...on Space X, Elon Musk or the ultimate aerospace poser turd, Richard Branson.

[pangaia]

20. OK, apologies. :>)

I had no idea until visiting this Christmas and getting the low down, or some of it.
I did really enjoy his easy way of explaining to my layman's mind about staged rocket engines, solid fuel vs liquid fuel, aerodynamics of the space shuttle, kerosene burners, high bypass engines, etc. I could listen all day.
He also knows Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Stockhausen, Rouse, which is much more my field, plus Monet, Degas, Klein and great cooking.. A rather renaissance guy.

I have always been fascinated by the likes of Burt Rutan, and watched that space jump from umteen thousand feet live. blew my mind..

[reACTIONary]

26. What's your opinion on...

...Planetary Resources?

http://www.planetaryresources.com/

(Don't get excited, just trying to yank your chain. )

[Aviation Pro]

27. Actually, I'm an advocate

The School of Mines in Golden, CO is part of the team that is building the foundation to mine the asteroid belt. IMO this is the right pathway for space exploration and will result in the acceleration of propulsion technologies (notice what I did there).

[reACTIONary]

28. Thnx. - I noticed :)

[blackspade]

19. I'd like to swap out 1 B-2 for

SNAP, Unemployment, etc. 2.2 billion would go a long way to helping a lot of people.

[reACTIONary]

22. $80 million? That's cheap! Will it...

...be able to fly through the radiation burst of an atmospheric nuclear detonation and still have all of its "fly-by-wire" systems fully functional?