Public Accounts committee  I think I will return to my deputy colleagues or the Chief of the Air Staff going forward.

Public Accounts committee  We haven't entered the detailed definition phase yet, and when we do, we'll do detailed studies on any infrastructure we need to upgrade in Bagotville and Cold Lake, on the number of simulators, training, and those detailed operating cost estimates when we get into definition.

Public Accounts committee  The joint strike fighter office gives us estimates of acquisition cost for flyaway F-35s. We put ammunition and fuel in. It also gives us estimates for maintenance, repair, overhaul—what we call sustainment. It doesn't give us estimates on how we would pay salaries or fix buildin

Public Accounts committee  Yes. As the deputy said, we've used these 20-year estimates for air programs since 2004. There is a significant amount of uncertainty in aerospace technology costs when you get beyond the 20 years. It becomes very difficult to predict. We have 60 years of experience in flying jet

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. My organization has been involved in the program since 1997. I have a very small section that was instrumental, working with Industry Canada, in working with industry and leveraging opportunities for Canadian companies in a very proactive manner. As Mr. Ken

Public Accounts committee  The secretariat will assist us in that and provide more rigorous...not necessarily a challenge function, but assistance. The process is as rigorous as it can be for an aircraft that we won't take delivery of for eight years. At this point in time, without funded definition activi

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Deputy and Mr. Chair. I would like to clarify that of the four phases of a project—identification, options analysis, where you identify your high-level requirements, do your preliminary estimates and seek approval in principle to begin a project, and then the definiti

National Defence committee  Thank you, sir. We have a small project planning team in place, with staff from my organization and from the chief of the Royal Canadian Air Force, General Deschamps, which is funded by the air force's ongoing operation budget. It is not vote 5, as a normal project, which requir

National Defence committee  There were no specific numbers, obviously, at the discussions in Washington. It will depend on the joint strike fighter program office continuing their analysis of the effect of their profiling 179 fighters from the first five years to a later production—

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair. What you're referring to is actually common to a number of our fleets. The process involves joint user groups, normally within NATO. What we do deliberately is to minimize the customization and Canadianization.... The members of the joint u

National Defence committee  All countries will pay the same unit flyaway price, the price of a complete aircraft. We'll all pay the same price in the year that the aircraft is produced. For example, in respect of the CTOL variant in, let's say, 2017, all of the countries that order the CTOL will pay the sam

Government Operations committee  Yes, which may not be the case. Thank you for the question. Deliveries are rarely early. Often in our business it's complex, difficult material that we need to take, which we put through vigorous testing. I will give the example of our truck project right now. We are buying th

Government Operations committee  We expect that the estimates, which are generated by a very detailed rigorous analysis right down to the component level by the global supply chain, will gradually change year by year. The trend is downward. All of the predictions that people have read about in the newspaper, the

Government Operations committee  It's very unlikely that they'll go up.

Government Operations committee  As the supply chain becomes more mature, as the production facilities in Europe and in Fort Worth, Texas, become faster and more efficient, and with the scales of quantity—as you start getting up to the point where you're delivering an aircraft every 1.5 days with a moving produc