Military Jet Engine Acquisition

As manufacturing processes and materials used in aircraft engine production change and new information on aircraft engine technology becomes available, cost-estimation techniques must be updated. The authors present the results of a RAND research project to develop a new methodology for estimating military jet engine costs. They first discuss the technical parameters that drive the engine development schedule, development costs, and production costs, and then present a quantitative analysis of actual historical data on development schedules and costs. Their principal focus was on adding new observations to the cost-estimating database from earlier RAND studies and updating the parametric relationships for aircraft engine costs and development time. The authors present a series of parametric relationships for forecasting the development cost, development time, and production cost of future military engine programs. Their results indicate that rotor inlet temperature is a significant variable in most of the reported estimating relationships. Full-scale test hours and whether an engine is new or derivative were also found to be significant measures.