More Research Next Time Please
Where does Mr Page get his figures from? Or rather, why only consult those who should know for one figure and make the rest up?
The cost of a C-17 is not £70 million but more like £130-150 million and climbing, EXCLUDING services. Through-life costs should be higher than A400M because it is a larger jet powered aircraft that burns more fuel. Also costs more to maintain unless the A400M low-maintenance composite concept does not work out. Saving grace is that the C-17 costs are now well understood, while the exact A400M operating costs remain to be validated in practice.
The idea was that A400M will have much bigger payload capacity and flexibility plus range and speed over C-130 (and particularly the smaller C.160 Transall used by France/Germany/Turkey) with similar ability to go into small unimproved airfields but cost less to acquire and operate than larger aircraft like C-17. Plus it can do some aerial refuelling work. As cost increases the range where this equation still works out is narrowing, but is probably still feasible. And the UK is making components and thus generating revenue/taxes/jobs from every A400M sold. On the American aircraft? Not so much (C-130 engines and some flight software on C-17, both in US subsidiaries).
How about digging through the archives and finding the A400M partners (people/countries) who insisted on developing the engines from scratch rather than use something off the shelf from Canada and present them with the lion share for the cost overrun? And the rest... well, name a large procurement project in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy etc that has not run over budget recently. The C-17 project was in a heap of trouble back in the 90s because of cost overruns and performance issues also. See how that turned out.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
