Fighter pilots cost more than planes? Still now with the multi-billion $ space age fighters + all the man hour maintaining them. I wish I was worth a billion. 
You wouldn't be the only pilot flying that plane... Fighter squadrons are typically manned at a 1.5 crew ratio, and while you might consider costs like maintenance and fuel per hour to be a cost of the plane, that isn't how it works. Those expenses go against the crews who fly the planes, since an airplane is just as capable if it flies one hour or 100 hours per month, while a pilot who flies 1 hr a month is useless.
Some very rough numbers...
Fighter hours run somewhere between $7,000 and $15,000 per hour. A typical fighter pilot requires a minimum of approx 9 sorties per month, each sortie averaging 1.3 hours, just to maintain minimum training requirements. That adds up to just over $2 million bucks each year per pilot just to maintain minimum qualifications and currencies. In an F-15E squadron, apply a 1.2 factor to that since pilots and WSOs sometimes can't double-log both of their training on the same sortie, then multiply by the number of pilots per squadron for total cost, and then divide again by the number of aircraft to get annual training expense *just for flight time* expended per aircraft, if you want to see why planners are always trying to cut both the number of aircraft as well as the number of aircrew. Oh yea, don't forget that we need to keep a hefty percentage of our pilots in staff positions that require operational experience, so after you train up these guys, half of them don't keep flying for much of their career, so you need even more pilots.
Tack on $2 mil or so per pilot for initial pilot training, including costs for everything from UPT through multiple mandatory survival schools.
That number also completely ignores wing support expenses and mission support expenses, such as maintaining and operating EW ranges, bombing ranges, etc. It also leaves out training munition and other misc. "expendable" expenses. All told, each fighter pilot probably costs anywhere from $4 to $8 million bucks per year.
That also explains why the govt has in the past handed out up to $25,000 per year in salary bonuses when they need pilots to stay in the AF... A total expense of $250,000 to keep a pilot with 10 years experience from taking $80 million in training out the door with him is a fairly good deal I think, but when they are making manning cuts sometimes those guys are rather abruptly shown the door, kicked out with no option to continue serving.
That's why they're looking at UAVs because it looks damn attractive on paper, but (according to aviation week) they're finding out that each UAV orbit requires somewhere around 100 support personnel, and the support expenses and manning requirements are still somewhat higher than the same support expenses for traditional manned aircraft. So the UAV "savings" aren't there yet and IMHO never really will be there, but that's also because IMHO on day 1 or 2 of a real shooting war, lots of UAVs will be shot down by dudes sitting on hilltops with optically guided AAA, binoculars, and unjammable dedicated wired or optical comm lines. But that's just my worthless opinion on a completely different subject.
Yes, it used to amaze me how much money was being pumped into my training, and it has been a source of focus to keep me motivated to keep "giving back" during my daily duties. Some days I'm the world's most overpaid janitor, one LtC I know figures he was the world's highest paid bellhop when he was an aid to some General, but the whole idea that our skills are essential and could make all the difference in the world during any conflict makes it easier to understand and accept the responsibility given to us, especially in terms of dollars invested in our training.
But maybe now you can see why I scoff a bit at most per-plane cost numbers... They're a huge up-front expense but compared to the manning and support costs, they're not even close to the biggest part of the equation. Except for the B-2 and I think some of the RC-135 variants...
