The $21 Million King Air

A lot of people buy the Beech King Air because it's a great balance of performance, efficiency and cost. The USAF recently realized that and decided to purchase several to use for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. However, the Air Force's idea of "cheap" may not exactly be like ours. According to the USA Today, it turns out they will be paying $21 million each for most of these aircraft.

Although this seems like a lot of most of us, it is probably more of a drop in the bucket for the Air Force. They are used to buying fighters that cost more than $200M each. Getting 10 very useful aircraft for the price of one fighter that may never see action (in the case of the F-22) seems like a pretty good deal to me.

The USA Today story has a picture of the MC-12 with it's military pain scheme. The article also mentions that the aircraft is late to deploy to current war zones. The first one was supposed to deploy in April, but it appears that none of them have been deployed so far. It's not too surprising considering that they have to make some modifications to the airframe and train crews to fly the plane in combat. The MC-12 is intended to help protect the troops on the ground, so I hope they can get everything figured out quickly. We'll let you know when we hear how they do when they make it to the field.