F-16 Source Code

"Thomas Schoene" wrote in message
link.net...
Simon Robbins wrote:
"Charles Talleyrand" wrote in message
...
I've just always wondered.
What does a sonobouy cost. It seems one could use lots of them
quicky, and there is no recovery mechanism. How expensive is all
this?

Not sure that I would be allowed to divulge costs, but they're pretty
cheap, i.e. hundreds of pounds, rather than thousands. As a rule of
thumb, active buoys tend to cost more than passive, and generally
speaking the greater the number of hydrophones, the more expensive
they are. But the greater cost is I'm sure fielding the aircraft to
drop and monitor them.

In the US, you can find the contract award with numebrs and total contract
costs as public information. For example:

Sparton Defense Electronics, DeLeon Springs, Fla., is being awarded a
$7,136,416 firm-fixed-price contract for 6,303 AN/SSQ-62E sonobuoys and
associated data.

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2..._ct075-03.html

That's a bit over a thousand dollars each (earlier contracts were similar,
in the range of $900 to $1300, usually). But the SSQ-62E is a directional
active (DICASS) buoy, about the most sophisticated type available.

Still, the cost has always been a concern and the Navy has made many
efforts
to field cheaper buoys for initial searches. While it's attractive to
imagine laying patterns of buoys every hour or so in front of a convoy,
the
sheer inventory needed for this is daunting. NATO could have run out very
fast in a notional WW3 Battle of the Atlantic.

--
Tom Schoene Replace "invalid" with "net" to e-mail
"If brave men and women never died, there would be nothing
special about bravery." -- Andy Rooney (attributed)

I visited Sparton Defense Electronics once (Sept '92), with another DOD
employee. We had been at Homestead as part of the team investigating the
damage, and stopped so he could visit some contacts. I remember being
surprised at the small size of their plant. Having dealt with the aircraft
manufactures I guess I expected the usual large defense contractor with an
complex of buildings covering several hundred-thousand square feet. Instead
it wasn't any larger than many industrial buildings found in any small
city/large town in the US or Canada. Heck every Mall I have seen was bigger.

Red Rider

Before anyone corrects our spelling it is Sparton, not Spartan.