Thank you for the question, Mr. McKay.
Right now the program is in what is referred to as low-rate initial production. So you have net R and D costs, you have relatively high costs associated with small batches of early production associated with the risks and challenges at that stage. Over time, typically what happens in fighter jet and other types of procurement is those costs decline, and one would hope that you would see those types of reductions over time.
In the context of this current airplane, the LRIP costs remain relatively high if you look at the shape of the production learner curve. So there are some concerns expressed by a number of countries that they would like to all defer purchases, including the United States government. It has also announced that it would like to defer production. The challenge ends up being in the long runs that not everybody can buy the last airplane in the production run, or fastest production sweet spot. So there are trade-offs among the partners that potentially could be required in order to balance between early costs and later costs.
When we did our analysis over a year ago, we did an estimate for the overall production run, which we estimated about $129 million per copy. Then we estimated a premium, given the time that the Canadian government had estimated acquiring the airplanes, which was among the earlier aircraft. So we estimate about a 15% increase.