New Air Force One instruction manuals cost $84M
thehill.com
thehill.com
Before I worked in aerospace as a structural engineer, I couldn't understand why airplanes are as expensive as they are.
Once I'd worked in aerospace as a structural engineer, I couldn't understand why airplanes aren't more expensive than they are.
I worked in stress analysis, where you'd analyze a part of an airplane to determine whether it fulfilled strength/fatigue life requirements. At this stage, the part's already been designed. So you take the part's material properties, geometry, surface preparation and coatings, machined features, and so on, and check it against anywhere from a few dozen to many thousands of load scenarios. You find the handful of critical load cases, and then you write up the analysis against those. The analysis is intended to be mostly self-contained, readable by any qualified engineer, and serve as a complete treatment of the part's structural sufficiency. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that every single structural component of an airplane is backed up by a stress analysis report running somewhere between 20 and 400 pages, written by one or more degreed engineers making what was, in the U.S. probably an average of $50-60/hr. Airliners are made up of many, many structural parts. The costs of proving the safety of those parts add up quickly.
Now, if I had to guess, instruction manuals are probably a bit cheaper to produce. Tech writers probably aren't as well compensated as engineers. But a lot of engineers' time will be eaten up nonetheless. (I once spent a memorable few weeks (!) proving that a dowel pin on a part that hadn't been machined correctly would not, during installation, shear off, so that existing installation documentation could still be used. Yay. After that I was known as the office dowel pin SME.) Good maintenance documents sweat the details and require input from designers, stress analysts, manufacturing engineers, supply chain representatives, and others. And then as the design evolves -- the design always evolves on the way to delivering a product -- these documents must be tweaked, added to, subtracted from, sometimes entirely rewritten, and those changes must be checked by a variety of folks.
So, $84 million for 100,000 pages might sound like a lot. But for what is in many ways a custom built aircraft, with divergences from the base aircraft that probably run into the millions, to me, it doesn't seem ridiculous.
I'm always amazed that for a few hundred bucks I can fly halfway around the world in a jetliner. Anyhow, you might be amused by this incident between me and the stress guy, when I was called over to visit them:
SG: We're concerned about the parts you're designing.
WB: Um, yes?
SG: Your parts are coming in at barely 1% stronger than the Ultimate Load.
WB: So they meet the requirement. What's the problem?
SG: How did you design them?
WB: I started with the load requirement, worked backwards to size the part, and rounded up the tolerances.
SG: We don't like that. We like to see 10% over.
WB: So, you want the parts to be overweight?
SG: No, we just feel better about stronger parts.
WB: But my parts meet the requirements at minimum weight. If you'd like stronger, heavier parts, you guys need to change the requirements.
SG: !@#$%^&*(
Hope you guys aren't still mad at me :-)
Humor me with a tangent: I think we should go back to design doing the stress work, for the most part, with some graybeards in stress and their anointed apprentices providing guidance and verification. AFAIK we really don't have the tech tools to do that efficiently, though, and nobody wants to invest the time. Design software needs access to all of the loads, temps, material properties from mil handbook, knockdowns, everything needs to be versioned and traceable, it needs to let you choose from a large catalog of analysis methods with good FEA as a fallback, show you the updated MS and critical load cases in realtime, always move your analysis nodes with the model as you edit it, export 3D models into the stress reports that remain live when the part/loads change so it changes in the next version of the report, etc. You mentioned git elsewhere. It would be so much better to validate stress report updates by viewing a diff. I could go on. Plenty to disrupt in this market, but the incentives aren't there for more than slow incremental change. I think only somebody who's willing to sink the money and open source the result has a chance at creating a revolution in how we design airplanes.
We were mentored by greybeards who worked on the B-47 and 747, and sometimes would still use a slide rule. I received quite a wonderful education from those guys.
I was the first flight controls engineer, that I could tell, who stole time on a PDP-11 to much more efficiently do my work beyond what was practical with a calculator. (I was called on the carpet for that, the manager of the computer center wanted me censured for it, but my boss's boss's boss went to bat for me and told him to fork off.)
It means somebody left out a load or a constraint, or messed up the material properties, which is all another way of saying the math model is wrong.
So when a part doesn't look right but seems to pass the math, be very suspicious of the math! :-)
(wikipedia does not have any other info, so I assumed you went to computer industry pretty much immediately after your aerospace eng degree...)
But we must remember a famous line from a bad movie: "You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?" Given what this aircraft is, what it does, I think it safe to assume a high degree of vagueness and miss-labeling in the non-classified version of the budget.
Use the $5 billion to build housing for homeless people.
We find/print money for things we want to do.
We have a national airborne command post, ultimately, in case the ground based command (the White House) is destroyed or under imminent threat requiring it to be (temporarily or permanently) abandoned. It's used for routine transport, and command and control while being used for routine transport, since it is desirable for it to be near the C-in-C at all times, and it doesn't make much sense not to use it.
Homeless people are outside the circle of social distance and, therefore, social sympathy. Just sayin' the way to lower the cost is to produce more and sell more reprints of the manual at scale.
Every single line of that document would have been double checked multiple times, and literally have 3x more documentation tracking why that piece of top level documentation exists and tracking any changes to it.
The average reading speed is about a page every 1-2 minutes (for non technical texts). 100.000 pages would then be a 800-1600 hour read, which is about half a year for a person spending 8 hours a day just flipping through pages.
Obviously such a manual is probably not meant to be read cover to cover, but even compared to a reference work, it's three times the volume of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica - a giant amount of information to be easily used.
The information in that manual is probably spread over the domain of 100's of people all performing different roles. I don't think their is any expectation that one single human would read the entirety.
Kinda like your car manual or university textbook. I've never read mine from cover to cover, but it is a useful reference sometimes. Particularly in the case of Air Force One where I doubt an internet search covers most troubleshooting requirements.
Research by thousands of highly trained engineers, compiled by experienced technical writers and illustrators: $83 million.
Research by highly trained engineers: $50M
Printer ink: $32M
However, I don't think this is the case, the cost probably has to do more with the specificity and overall data included.
Yeah, not your point, but it was a great line in a great movie.
On the subject of why it's billed differently: well, first, transparency. What would you make you feel better? Getting a $4 billion lump quote for a giant project, or seeing that $4 billion itemized down so you can check the underlying data?
Edit: Oops, sorry, data entry failure. Thanks for the corrections. Fixed.
It's more like, we're going to bury this in a cavern, and when we dig it up in 100 years, it absolutely, positively has to work.
Salaried employees don't get paid by hour our output. If it takes a team a half a year to write the doc, they still get paid for the rest of the year.
Regardless, the cost nevet reflects the effort put into it. It is simply what they charge because they can and because the buyer pays and because the competition is not offering something better when bidding.
One of the reasons I left aerospace is I found out that when a project ends, you and 2,000 of your closest friends all hit the street at the same time. :-)
Or as another friend put it when we were discussing the big companies: "If you work for Boeing, you'll always have a job. But you may have to move to Florida to keep it." And current events show the first part isn't even true any more...
That's a ceiling but not a floor. Things never cost less than the expense of producing them. 840 per page or so does not sound excessive for this sort of thing--I'm surprise it's not 10x more.
(Yeah, loss leaders occasionally, but don't look for that in military contracts.)
On a document this big, you need to properly organize and index it so that the maintenance personnel would be able to find the relevant bits easily. that's a lot of editing job required, and a lot of coordination (to properly reference and label each subsystem for example).
Also, this document requires a lot of reviews and a lot of the maintenance procedures needs to actually be performed to actually check if they are clear enough to be executed reliably by operators/maintenance personnel.
All that is a lot of work, requiring a significant amount of man hours by skilled people and hardware and tooling available for validation.
You're off by an order of magnitude. It works out to $840/page.
Oracle sells products/services that thousands or millions of organizations purchase. That's a completely different kind of business arrangement than something that a single entity purchases once. If you hire a software consultant to build you a custom system, they're definitely going to charge you for the time they spend writing documentation.
Then, of course, the final document needs to be reviewed and signed off on by all those people, likely with multiple revisions.
8.4 hours per page seems like it'd be on the low side, if anything.
"This contract modification is to modify commercial manuals, update with VC-25B-specific information and deliver integrated manuals for the VC-25B system"
https://m.dw.com/en/man-finds-himself-sitting-next-to-german...
Not by first choice, but still..
Respect!
Meanwhile, Trump flew to Switzerland to the World Economic Forum (wow, that was actually this year, while Wuhan was in crisis) with 2 "Air Force One"'s...
As for moving the president around - It's not just the vc-25a 'air force one's
They would have had at least one cargo plane to deliver his car.
And there was probably an E-4 Advance Airborne Command Post somewhere nearby too.
A lot of contracting arrangements like this will ratably assign overhead to particular change orders or line items in ways which will cause the apparent cost of the line item to be higher than one might think necessary. This is, mostly, to avoid there being a "$250k for the manual; $5 billion for Miscellaneous Expenses" sort of bill.
(The question of whether government contracting is optimal is a long and involved one outside the scope of this comment.)
My point about the headline number of $84 million... this is not a real number in that it reflects more than just the cost of manuals. It reflects the stimulus and backstop of strategically important private defense manufacturers like Boeing and others.
Though I imagine both will occur in the fullness of time.
The compiling all of that into a cohesive whole.
1) Mechanics and pilots are responsible for knowing the aircraft systems. Who has time to read and memorize 100,000 pages? How do you recruit new pilots in an efficient manner?
2) The cost could have been largely avoided by using an off-the-shelf airplane, instead of a billion dollar frankenstein. Possibly with the additional electronics in pods that have a limited interface with the airplane electrical system.
Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot.