J-20 5th Gen Fighter Thread VIII
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
Brøther this is the J-20 thread.
Also WTF is a "milk dragon"
He is taking about writing article on Chinese civilian space flight.
He's advertising his public account where he writes articles on aerospace but not PLA stuff.
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
Would be a sweet name for a mid-air refueling tanker!
Did we ever get reliable estimation of per unit cost? Since it's in mass production for a while now, it would be interesting to look at how much efficient China is in producing the J20,
No sadly.
In fact there is none so far about cost estimates of J-20's. I have my own estimates tho using DAPCA which indicates Flyaway cost+ RDTE 112 M USD/airframe for assumed production run of 250 aircrafts + 12 prototypes.
Assuming 95% learning curve (as one expect changes from batch to batch e.g engines, otherwise it would be 80%) and further batch of 100 aircrafts, cost can be lowered to 95M USD, and will get lower as production increased more. If that batch become 300 aircrafts expect cost as low as 88M USD.
all in FY 2020 (as my DAPCA spreadsheet is bit old and i havent updated it to the latest Fiscal Year) Using the inflation calculator that 95M becomes 115 M USD for 2024 USD while 88M USD for 300 additional aircrafts become 107M USD.
It's all for me very reasonable cost.. Obviously it would be increased a bit as no one selling fighter in flyaway cost, there will be some profit involved.
It'd be better if you don't guess so wildly
We know that J-10C export to PAF goes for $50 million each and it was sold with minimal profit, so a domestic copy in my calculation costed about $45 million when production run is at 30 to at most 40 per year (production rate for it in the last couple of year of its production for PLAAF)
J-16 with 2 engines and larger airframe would still have 1 radar, 1 set of power management system and such. A reasonable estimate would be 40-50% higher unit cost than J-10C when production run is at 40 to 50 per year -> that would put it's cost at around $65m
Now, if J-20 was produced at same rate as J-16, it would like be more expensive. But considering that they are both using the same engines and similar generation/size of radar and size. Just how much more can J-20 cost? I would say 50% more would be the very top end. As we've seen with F-35 vs F-15EX cost, the 5th generation aircraft that's smaller and produced at scale is cheaper than the 4th generation aircraft.
So, J-20 at 40 to 50 per year would be around $90 to 100m per year. However, J-20 is now produced at 100 per year and possibly even higher.
General rule of manufacturing is doubling of production leads to close to 20% in reduction in unit cost. So since the production more than doubled with J-20, we'd need to take 20% discount on its production cost. And that would lower it to $75m/aircraft at most. This could be lowered probably even further to $60-70 million per aircraft as scaling increases to up to 120 and then 150 per year, dependent on the production rate, mature supply chain and additional efficiency gained along the way.
Remember, the cost of composite material, radar component, computation power, titanium and RAM (meta material) have dropped at pretty rapid pace in China over the past few years.
it is unlikely you can go from procuring 30 J-10s, 40 flankers and 10 J-20s per year to over 100 J-20s + 15-20 flankers per year over a period of 5 years when military budget is only going up by 40% in the same period unless cost of J-20 has dropped to close to the cost of flanker production
It always boggles me whenever people claims that the J-20's unit cost is ~100 million USD, but somehow is okay with the 054A FFG's price tag figure being 350+ million USD and that of the 052D/DG's price tag of 550-600 million USD.
Like, really? Should we really be expecting that one 4000-ton FFG is worth about 3.5x 5th-gen heavyweight fighters, and that one 052D/DG is worth about 5.5-6x 5th-gen heavyweight fighters?
Like, really? Should we really be expecting that one 4000-ton FFG is worth about 3.5x 5th-gen heavyweight fighters, and that one 052D/DG is worth about 5.5-6x 5th-gen heavyweight fighters?