Yes. Thank you, Deputy.
Mr. Chair, thanks for that opportunity.
The joint strike fighter program office work is based on hundreds of thousands of hours of detail work by experts, project managers, engineers, test experts, and costers. It is also based on actual contract expenses that have gone into the 40 or so joint strike fighters that have been produced. The estimates going forward are called selected acquisition reports.
The 2010 decision was based on the SAR 2009 acquisition report. That was at about $75 million per aircraft. In the 2010 report it grows slightly to about $83 million, and in the latest it is about $85 million.
What we're seeing is the curve, which has the very high cost to build the first prototype sinking downwards to the most efficient point of production, where we're going to buy, becoming very tight. The variation is becoming very small year to year, because their degree of understanding of what the costing would be is getting very high. And the fixed inputs to setting up production have been done. Testing has well progressed. The remaining technical issues are being resolved. So confidence is becoming much higher.
Thank you, sir.