经济学人下载:最后一代有人驾驶战斗机

The danger for Lockheed Martin is that if orders start to tumble, the F-35 could go into a death spiral. The fewer planes governments order, the more each one will cost and the less attractive the F-35 will be. This happened to the even more sophisticated and expensive F-22. By cutting its order from 750 to 183, the Pentagon helped to drive the programme cost per aircraft of the F-22 up from $149m to $342m.

Lockheed Martin面临的风险是，如果订单数量骤减，F-35可能就一蹶不振了。各国政府订购的飞机数量越少，则每架飞机的成本就越高，F-35的吸引力就越小。类似情况曾发生在更先进更昂贵的F-22身上。五角大楼将F-22的订单从750架减少至183架，让每架飞机承担的项目成本从1.49亿美元飙升到了3.42以美元。

Lockheed Martin’s investors doubt this will happen to the F-35: the share price has been remarkably stable over the past two years. Tom Burbage, the executive who helped run the F-22 programme and who has also been in charge of the F-35’s development from the start, is still in charge—evidence that the company thinks he is doing a decent job. Mr Burbage says that a programme as big as the F-35 is bound to attract barbs. The main cause of the delays and cost over-runs, he says, is a problem with the weight of the STOVL version that came to light in 2004. It was impossible to continue work on the other two variants while this was being dealt with, he says. The plane was slimmed by 2,700lb (1,225kg), but this severely disrupted the supply chain that Lockheed Martin had put together with its main partners (BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman). That set the project back by nearly two years. On the bright side, Mr Burbage says that applying a similar diet to the other two variants yielded better planes.

Lockheed Martin公司的投资人不相信F-35会重蹈覆辙：公司的股价在过去两年异常稳定。Tom Burbage是公司的一名高管，曾参与F-22项目的运行，也从一开始就负责F-35的研发，现在也是如此-这说明公司认为他干得还不赖。Burbage说像F-35这么大的项目肯定会招来非议。他说进度拖延和成本超支的主要原因是STOVL版本战机在2004年暴露出了自身重量存在问题。据他称，在解决这个问题的同时，不可能再继续开发另外两个版本的战机。飞机最后减重了2700磅（1.225吨），但却严重打乱了Lockheed Martin和其主要合作伙伴（BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman）衔接起来的供应链，工程因此延后了两年时间。凡事也有好的一面，Burbage说另外两个版本的飞机实施相同的瘦身计划后变得更好了。

Mr Burbage is also confident that once production at the firm’s mile-long factory in Fort Worth ramps up to 17 aircraft a month, as planned, the more pessimistic unit-cost projections will start to fall. That, however, remains a distant prospect while the design of the aircraft keeps changing.

Burbage相信，公司位于Fort Worth的绵延数百米的厂房一旦能按计划达到17架/月的产量，对于单位成本的悲观论断就会开始减少。然而，飞机的设计仍然在改来改去，这种想法只是种遥远的启盼。

Even so, Mr Burbage points out that the fixed-price contract agreed with the Pentagon for 32 aircraft in the fourth production lot (including a 13% margin for Lockheed Martin) is half the price of the first lot of aircraft. Mr Burbage predicts that the average cost of the air force version will eventually be around $65m—about the same as the F-16 sells for today. One reason for the much higher Pentagon forecasts is that the cost is built up to include every contingency, including projecting inflation over the whole production cycle.

即使这样，Burbage指出公司与五角大楼签订的第四批投产的32架飞机定价合同（给Lockheed Martin留出了13%的利润空间）中的飞机报价仅为第一批投产飞机价格的一半。他预测空军装备的版本最终的均价会在650万美元/架左右-现在F-16的价格大致相同。五角大楼给出的估价要高出很多，一个原因是将所有可能发生的情况都考虑在内了，包括在整个生产周期内的发生通货膨胀的可能性。

In other words, the Pentagon and its contractor calculate future costs in completely different ways. That vertigo-inducing $1 trillion figure is so high because it covers such a long period—the government changed its initial cost projections to cover 50 rather than 30 years. It also increased the number of bases the aircraft would be stationed at from 33 to 49.

换言之，五角大楼和它的承包商在用截然不同的方法计算未来的费用。之所以出现那个高得令人头晕的一万亿美元，是因为它跨越的时间相当长-政府把预测成本的参考时间由起初的30年改成了50年，同时还设想空军基地的数量将由33个增加到40个。