Our first C-130J
Here it is:
Via David Pugliese's Ottawa Citizen blog. Earlier, from Dec. 8, 2009 (via Baden Guy at Milnet.ca):
Canada's first of 17 next-generation C-130J tactical transports has emerged from the paintshop at Lockheed Martin's Marietta manufacturing site in Georgia.
Ottawa signed a $1.4 billion deal in January 2008 for its new fleet of C-130Js, all of which will be produced in the stretched-fuselage -30 configuration...
[More here and here on that contract. This is the latest on the Airbus A400M that many claimed should have been in a competition with the Jerc: "French government 'doing everything' to save A400M"--which only made its first flight just over a month ago.]
...Deliveries of the new aircraft will start later this year, and be completed during 2012...
Canada’s First CC-130J Closer to CompletionThen a Jan. 13 CP story:
During the evening of December 7th, the first two of Canada’s 17 CC-130Js moved to the front of the production line in Marietta. The CC-130J on the left in the photo below is the first and is in the position for interior trim. The CC-130J on the right is in the final assembly position. The aircraft will be delivered in the spring of 2010.
$723M military plane maintenance contract announcedRelated post:
C-130J mainentance contract likely to be short term, cost lotsIf should also not be forgotten that there was also a lot of clamouring for the A400M to be in a competition with the C-17--see here. Now think of the people of Haiti.
posted by Mark, Ottawa at 4:20 p.m.
4 Comments:
A beautiful sight to see.
When it lands in Canada it will be even more beautiful.
And to think "experts", especially those who write for our lame stream media, wanted us to buy the A400.
But they are experts, so who am I to poke a stick in their highly inflated egos and ruin their sense of being legends in their own minds?
Maybe they can get a trip to Seville for the day that EADS announces the cancellation of the A400M program.
That's one good lookin' aircraft.
While Mr. Harper was purchasing C-17's Jack Layton was looking into a bill C-17. The legalization of pot in Canada. Prime Minister Harper can now fly Canadians all over the globe, at a moments notice. It could be argued that Jack Layton's bill would have allowed Canadians to fly quite high also. Just not to Haiti, full of relief supply's.
Hmmm...fired up my trusty Windows Calculator:
$723 million total for 7 yrs sounds different than the penultimate breakdown to $6,075,000 per year, per bird maintenance cost.
As quoted in the same CTV article, the actual price per bird is about $82,353,000. Now compare that to the A400M.
EADS and the European governments committed to buying the A400M are now at loggerheads over the latest major price escalation. The per bird price was contracted to have been $165 million. However, EADS now says it MUST have a $20 million per bird price increase or EADS will be forced to cancel the whole A400M program.
That'd be $185 million per bird. Even The Usual Suspect "journalists" should be able to comprehend that arithmetic.
And it's unstated whether or not that covers the cost of the major post delivery fixes that, without them, will reduce the carrying capacity to at or slightly more than the capacity of the C-130J Stretch's 24 tons. (Not the 30 tons still carelessly and falsely thrown around by the "lame stream media", as Fred describes them.)
So, Canada could have waited and paid AT LEAST twice as much for the A400M, with delivery dates, even delivery at all, uncertain. And with the uncertainty and potential huge expense of those major post-delivery repairs.
Or Canada could have done what it (very wisely, IMO) did: buy the C-130J Stretches, with first deliveries in the next couple of months to CF bases and flying CF missions.
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