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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

Sometimes, but not always. People tend to underestimate how much costs are coming from certification, testing and corresponding warranties.

The F-117 so did canabalize quite some "spares" bought for the F-16 and F-15 fleets.

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A trash can needs to be tested and certified for use in the Pentagon?

... holding a small collection of waste is that intense eh?

If it goes on a plane, not as cargo but as part of the equipment: yes. Inflameable, certification paper work, corresponding risk for the supplier, obligations to provide said waste bin for, sometimes, 50 years after last serial delivery... That stuff adds up very quickly. Throw in low quantities, and the high NRC ammortized per unit, and that explains a bunch of said prices.

Plus obligatory surcharge for being aerospace, plus obligatory surcharge for being military.

There was a major incident with nuclear weapons caused by pillows on a B52 catching fire:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash

The pillows were the fires fuel. The original cause was heater/cooler systems malfunctioning (at least based on the page you linked)

I probably could have worded that better but my point was that if the pillows hadn't been inflammable then the bomber probably wouldn't have crashed?

"obligations to provide said waste bin for, sometimes, 50 years after last serial delivery"

This is obviously not a problem since you can charge literally whatever you want after the initial purchase.

It obviously is a serious problem. Because all money in the world doesn't miraculiously materialize the needed production facilities over night.

Do realize that you are a justifying these late-in-the-contractual obligation parts being expensive because they might have to provide the parts for a long time?

If the fact that they will have to provide them for a long time is the reason for a high cost, then that is why they charged $300 per trash can back in the day. That cannot also be the justification for $56k per trash can today. It's a circular argument.

It as, since the initial spare part contract ran out, and thus the old price of 300 bucks no longer applied.

This doesn’t add up to 50k. Maybe 300. Probably not even

> This doesn’t add up to 50k.

It's a procurement project to purchase four very specific aviation trash cans for an aircraft that's no longer made.

The cans themselves aren't the cost. The project manager, the paperwork expert who does the thousands of pages of documents, etc. all cost before they even think about setting up a production line (for an hour's run!) to actually make the things. They're also factoring in the cost of keeping the 707 trash can making machinery sitting around for the next time they need a few more of them.

Four trash cans cost $52k. Forty probably would've cost $53k. The military should probably buy four hundred so they never have to buy another one for the remaining few years the E3 exists, but then Congress calls that wasteful spending too.

Then they'd be spending thousands every year to store them at a secure facility :P

Last time I calculated storage costs, it was around 50 cents per day per cbm. Add in military security and so on, and your not far from it.

Well, you can take that from someone who does it for a living (not for Boeing or the Pentagon, bit still), or not. Your choice. Whether or not 50k is actually justified or not, no idea. But the price for a new, low volume, production of obsolete aircraft spares is orders of magnitude more expensive than the original high volume one. And even it if is old stock, as soon as the low contractual prices are running out, everyone is paying market prices. And those mean: either you pay, you don't fly or you certify an alternative.

There is only one buyer for these parts. "Paying the market price" means that Boeing charges whatever they want, and that's the market price, take it or leave it.

The upside of being a single source supplier.

Ah. So the system is corrupt. Got it.

Being a single source supplier has nothing to do with corruprion. How do you read that into my comment?

> ... holding a small collection of waste is that intense eh?

If it catches fire on the $330M plane it's made for, potentially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash involved a ~$80M (adjusting for inflation) lost B-52, another $80M in cleanup costs, and a still missing 1.1 megaton nuclear weapon, over a couple pillows that caught fire.

The traditional response is “over-specification” with a coffee pot on a commercial airliner needing to be certified against becoming a dangerous missile in the event of a plane crash (shatter, break, etc).

Yes, it may be that the trash can or plastic had to be certified against breaking in a weird way since it’s a military plane and you don’t want plastic shrapnel in your soldiers (or whatever).

It _could_ be that Boeing made 100 trash cans, threw away the mold, and had to re-make the mold in order to fulfill the order for 4 more trash cans.

If not Boeing, potentially _their_ trash can supplier threw away the mold and you end up with the same price.

So there MAY be a reasonable explanation, but it seems very egregious that the “before” and “after” prices are so dramatically different.

You should have a look at the prices for aircraft spares, even re-used ones, and how much the same item costs when sourced for production. And that is without adding another 50% to the price in orser to get lead times down from 15 weeks to 15 days, from 15 days to 15 hours.

They go into airplanes, not the Pentagon, which is right at the beginning of TFA.

So they are probably weirdly shaped.

It is for a specific airplane, not a generic trash can sitting by someone's desk. It has to be a specific size, shape, weight, fire resistance, and probably other factors I can't think of.

Filing government levels of paperwork, especially for the defense sector is incredibly expensive. All that is reflect into the price of equipment.

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