We're looking for a program that will help us develop new technology, new products like we had on SADI and like we had in the past with TPC. I'm sure you've had presentations from the AIAC and Aéro Montréal that gave you the details of these programs.
I want to share with you the landing gear project, for example. Typically when we tried to win a new landing gear program it was all about a new airplane, so we have to design first and develop a new product. The ticket normally, depending on the size of the airplane, is anywhere between U.S. $50 million to U.S. $70 million, and the cycle time to develop this is long. It takes five years.
I'll give you an example. We were selected in 2007 to develop the CH-53K helicopter landing gear, which is the largest helicopter that will be built in the western world. We started in 2007, and in 2020 we are starting now to produce the first production units. You can see that the development cycle is very long and financially very tough to support.
If we have no support from the Canadian government as we have had in the past, we will not win these programs, and these programs will go somewhere else.
When I started, do you know how many design engineers I had? Zero. Do you know how many I have today? I have 200. Do you know how many employees I had when I started? I had 200. Today I have 2,000. That is the impact of these programs that were in place back then.