Was the SR-71 produced at a lower cost than the F-35?

Here is more the Hermeus Podcast episode with with former Air Force pilot and general Robert Behler on the SR-71. He provides some management lessons and perspectives on cost.

I recommend that you keep your team small and keep your management — the ones that make decisions has to be very limited. You need to keep going fast. Speed is important in development and flying it. Go back to the SR-71 days. By time they got on contract and flew the first operational mission which is only about three years. They built that airplane from A-12 designs and they got that thing going in a couple years and delivered their airplanes to the Air Force.

 

The contract was for about six or seven airplanes they finally built 32. The price per airplane was $23 million dollars a copy. Today’s CPI [consumer price index] it’s about $250 million dollars a copy. That’s still cheap for that airplane.

 

The fact is, Kelly and Lockheed, they were moving fast. They didn’t want any oversight. Keeping people off of it during the development, especially for these early test vehicles.

It strikes me that a lot of people will agree that fast, iterative, and agile processes work well for software, but when it comes to major systems the traditional documentation and waterfall methods still work. I think a review of the most important major systems developments would find differently. The SR-71, the B-52, the Nautilus, the Polaris missile, the Corona satellite, the Predator drone, are but a few that come to the top of my mind.

The fact that the SR-71 was built for $23 million a copy in the 1960s is quite amazing. Behler estimates in today’s dollars, that’s $250 million over 32 purchased. By comparison, the F-35A variant’s first 25 production aircraft (and engines) cost $273 million on average in constant 2022 dollars. Including the next lot buy, the first 47 F-35As cost an average of $243 million in 2022 dollars.

I think Behler overestimated the SR-71’s cost in today’s dollars. The CPI in 1964, the year of the SR-71’s first flight, compared to a 2022 base year was 0.108. So basically a factor of ten which gets you north of $200 million. But using the standard method adjusting for inflation with the GDP price index, you’d get an index value of 0.14 and a result of $164 million a copy. And if you had the actual time phasing of production that might tick down to $150 million.

In other words, I’d estimate that the SR-71’s first 32 units produced cost about the same less than the F-35A’s first 32 units. Of course there are a lot of other things going on, but most of them seem to be in the SR-71’s favor. The F-35 cost does not include any RDT&E, it did not include tooling (an RDT&E CLIN), it was geared for major production, it was not breaking nearly as much new ground, etc.