Well, even though Saab is apparently producing one more batch of C/D for Bulgaria, if even that is too expensive for the Minister, the alternative would be mothballed A/B Gripens modified to C/D standard (all stock A/B models have been retired as unsuitable for combat despite accumulating only a fraction of their planned flight hours). For F-16, the production line is closing this year unless new orders are made (but again, they think it's too expensive), but F-16V is of course a possibility, ie. low-hour airframes pulled from the Boneyard and modified to Block 52+ standard but fitted with AESA radar. Of course, Austria is surrounded by NATO countries so they can probably get by with an armed trainer for airspace monitoring (assuming that if eg. Tu-160's penetrate that far, something has already gone
very wrong).
But for the record, I simply don't believe the stated flight hour cost of 80k€ - F-22 costs
reportedly about 30k€ per flight hour, F-15 about 20k€, Super Hornet about 10k€.
An unsourced claim says Eurofighter costs about 12k€per hour. Either there is something very, very,
very wrong with their air force, or someone unfamiliar with cost accounting does not understand the concept of "machine hour" at all and thinks that as the variable cost; if the aircraft have cost 1,7 billion and have flown a total of 21 250 hours (so about 1400 hours each), then the "cost per flight hour" could indeed be calculated as 80 000. But if they will fly 2 800 hours each, then the "machine hour" will drop to 40 000 each. And so forth. And it's still not the variable operating cost that depends on the hours flown.
(True story; back in the School of Economics, a colleague in the same M.Sc thesis class was making her thesis on the accounting of a local hospital. They had recently acquired an expensive CT scanner. Someone making the decisions, having no idea of what the "beancounters" do, had seen the numbers and deduced that the cost of "machine hour" - initial investment divided by estimated hours in use, which is a sunk cost that has already happened, except that it becomes smaller per hour the more you use the machine, and even the original assumption had been calculated assuming a single 8-hour shift per day! - was so expensive that the device should not be operated
at all, except under a direst of circumstances, instead of operating said device 24/7 to get the full benefit out of their investment...)