Estimating the Relationships between the State of the Art of Technology and Production Cost for the U.S. Aircraft

The primary objective of this theses is to determine relationships that exist between production cost and the state of the art of technology and extensions in technology for high-technology systems. The data sample selected for study was U.S. military tactical aircraft. The central methodology used in the analysis of the aircraft data base includes: 1) The development of measures for the state of the art of technology and the level of technology advance that exists within U.S. fighter and attack aircraft programs; 2) The development of measures for each aircraft program's production cost; and 3) The application of various statistical procedures (regression analysis) to test specific hypotheses and build models to explain the relationships between technology and cost. General conclusion from this study are that significant relationships do in fact exist between aircraft production cost and specific technology measures. Keywords: Data collection. (KR)