How does one know of costs of any and everything?

[shin_getter]

There is a reasonable amount of accessible material on aircraft related physics. What is frustrating to me is the inability to find know costs of everything, especially with everything being a moving target.

So how does one get one's head over the costs of an aircraft, from design, materials, fabrication, certification, maintenance and so on?

What are the best material for learning about the above? Ideally one could track price changes over time. Is there listing of bill of materials and its prices for various aircrafts?

 

[DWG]

Don't forget manpower costs if you're trying to estimate development or operational costs.

100 engineers for a year is going to cost you several million before they've even sat down, licensing software tools for them might cost hundreds of thousands per tool (been there, submitted that estimate), then you'll need office space, admin, HR, management, the costs add up. And that's just for one team out of dozens on a modern aircraft, and you might well need that team for years before the aircraft ever flies.

Cost per flight hour might seem simpler, with people occasionally talking about specific figures, but wasn't it $30k/flight hour LM just committed to for F-35 operations over the next couple of years? Even though they don't know what the actual costs will be (ISTR it's currently £35k/flight hour) , political pressure demanded a specific figure, not the one they'll actually see in reality.

And turning to hardware you can get tremendous variation in the book cost of an aircraft based on less tangible issues: we don't want you going to Airbus, we want to lure you away from Boeing, we need someone to place the first order, I need to meet my quarterly sales target to get my bonus, and so on.

 

[stealthflanker]

There is no single "best" material to learn cost estimate unfortunately.

even every company may have different equations or methods to asess and maybe even present their cost estimate. Plus for Cost/flight hour every country may have differing view on what to include. Even Military and commercial CPFH equation may be different and can't be directly comparable.

 

[asiscan]

Try US Congressional Special Hearings records for a historical account of budget versus reality. Google books has some. You can use approximate project financial blowouts from these records as a guide but it depends a lot on what EXACTLY you like to track, system, platform and timeframe. If you expand on want your looking for, and please do, I'm sure you'll get a better answer than this.

 

[asiscan]

There is no single "best" material to learn cost estimate unfortunately.

even every company may have different equations or methods to asess and maybe even present their cost estimate. Plus for Cost/flight hour every country may have differing view on what to include. Even Military and commercial CPFH equation may be different and can't be directly comparable.

Cost depends on who and what company department you are taking to.. amortization cost is the best figure.

 

[Sundog]

One of the ways you can do this is by making a list/spreadsheet, of all of the aircraft in the same class as the one you are designing. Then try to get the breakdowns of various weights for that aircraft, such as the aero-structure, the propulsion, the avionics, etc. In general, if you know the weight of your aircraft a very rough first estimate can be made by taking the comparable aircraft and diving the price by the weight to get the cost per pound. Then take the weight of your aircraft and multiply it by that same number and you should be in the ballpark. Many times you can find the price of the propulsion systems, avionics, etc in various magazines and while you can't get the prices of everything, if you know approximately how much the existing aircraft's propulsion system cost, some of the avionics, etc, you can start to be able to make educated costs on what various systems cost based on percentages of total listed prices for the aircraft or using the weight breakdowns you calculated. You can then look for articles from business journals on how profitable some programs are, etc and try to determine costs based on the prices. However, for most companies that will be proprietary for competitive reasons. Raymer and Roskam have general formulas for figuring all of that out.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Don't forget graft. Don't forget bribes. Don't forget lobbyists. Don't forget your goat leggings.

 

[red admiral]

Or you can use software like:

SEER
PRICE Trueplanner
Or for lower cost then DAPCA by RAND is pretty widely used for initial studies

But all of these depend on the datasets used to create the Cost Estimating Relationships and knowledge of "what" you're trying to cost forecast. You often want to dig into the underpinning data/CERs to get specific insight for your specific problem. Which isn't possible in the above commercial tools.

 

[riggerrob]

It is also important to know all that is included in a sales bid. For example, Canada's federal gov't used the excuse that F-35 is too expensive. The real change is a new form of accounting that tries to predict the total cost (fuel, spares, man-power, up-grades, etc.) over a 30-year life. This new form of accounting makes F-35 look prohibitively expensive compared with earlier generations of fighters.

The Trudeau Liberal gov't used the new form of accounting as a excuse to cancel buying F-35s. Instead, they invested heavily in over-hauling ang up-grading (EASA) the almost 40-year-old fleet of CF-18A.
Trudeau's real motivation was spending the money elsewhere in hopes of buying enough votes to win the next election. Few politicians can think beyond their re-election.

In comparison, the old accounting system deliberately under-estimated costs in order to buy more airframes up front. A former colleage was transferred to National Defense Headquarters and tasked with ordering tires for Canada's new fleet of P-3 Auroras. After reviewing USN spare parts history, he wrote an order for 100 nose-wheels. His (petty officer/sargent) told him to reduce the order to 30 nosewheels. "But, but, but!"
"Relax. I know that is not enough nose-wheels for a year. When we run out, we will find additional funds in the flight-safety budget."

 

[Reaper]

https://www.gao.gov/ should have a lot of cost data. Alternatively as mentioned above Price TruePlanning software.