Also means that there are way fewer airframes to spread development costs across.
Looks like we both read it, but not all of us understood the implications of it.
Looks like we both read it, but not all of us understood the implications of it.
There's also some foresight involved here. I used to work for a company that delivered computers for industrial applications such as ASML and FEI (lithography machines and electron microscopes). They had very precise requirements: "we want Intel Xeon 5119 Rev 3 CPUs for the next 4 years, not Rev 2, not Rev 4, the revision shall be 3 and 3 shall be the number of the revision. Revision 5 is right out". The same applied with mainboards, memory, etc. There was also an entire testing procedure involved for many of these things and not all components passed.
So, we charged them more for this then $random_person buying a component, obviously, but we also talked to them beforehand and knew roughly how many units they expected to sell, overbought components in bulk beforehand before they were EOL, and sold the rest afterwards fairly cheaply (because by then they were pretty old components). The volumes for these kind of machines is low (on the order of dozens or hundreds a year) so this was all practical. We made a fair but far from exuberant profit from this.
I see no reason why this couldn't have happened here: "oh, your trash cans are going EOL; we expect to need 40 of them in the next 30 years, please produce them before you EOL them".
I don't know which party failed on this part, but someone did. Possibly both. Even ordering two new-price trash cans leaves you with 250 of them at the old price. Storage isn't free either so let's assume 150 of them.
Congress. The big stink would go from "we bought four $52k trash cans" to "we bought hundreds of trash cans we won't need for a decade, if ever!"
Examples:
Rand Paul complaining about things like $8M in unused solar panels: https://www.paul.senate.gov/news-sen-rand-paul-highlights-18...
Bobby Jindal saying "Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.": https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/bobby-jindal-...
Unfortunately, both of those things frequently happen simultaneously.
4 extra =/= hundreds extra
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And why did the government spend $8M(!!) in unused solar panels? I could have gotten 26,000+ trash cans at $300 each!
> And why did the government spend $8M(!!) in unused solar panels?
Spares? A lower than expected defect rate? Who knows? Paul doesn't provide useful specifics, just the politically sexy top-level numbers.
In an organization with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget, $8M in unused solar panels is a bit like you throwing away a ream of paper that got some water damage.
> In an organization with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget, $8M in unused solar panels is a bit like you throwing away a ream of paper that got some water damage.
And yet a fraction of that amount is front page HN.
Clearly a lot of other people believe differently.
A lot of people believe incorrect things about stuff they don't understand, yes. HN most certainly isn't immune.
Outrage bait is hardly a new phenomenon. The unit cost looks insane because it's a side effect of the fact that a defense contractor won't get out of bed without a minimum of a couple hundred grand in the contract to cover the program.
The reading of the article implies the contract set prices for commercial items and Boeing simply started charging the army whatever as soon as it technically wasn't 'commercial'.
There used to be economies of scale. It's a 707; they stopped being made in 1979. If you want 707 parts now, there's a good chance they're gonna be produced on a very small scale custom job for you.
(It's also a very special 707, inside and out. Cabin designs can vary significantly from airline to airline, let alone civilian to military.)
> The investigation also revealed that Raytheon Technologies had raised the price of Stinger missiles from $25,000 to more than $400,000 per unit. “Even accounting for inflation and some improvements, that’s a seven-fold increase,” Shay Assad, a former Pentagon acquisitions official, told 60 Minutes.
The US ramped UP how many stinger missiles it bought so how could your explanation lead to an increase in price? Especially one so dramatic?
This isn’t some specialized part that the plane requires to fly. It’s just a trash can.
Hell, just go to Target and buy one that’s similarly sized. It would be cheaper to fly across the country to find one at this point.
It is a trash can that must not fly around the E-3's cabin if they're making evasive maneuvers.
It is a trash can that must fit in a specific spot in a plane first made in 1957 and ended production in the 1970s.
It must have been confirmed via a vigorous process to fulfill all these requirements and approved for aviation use.
You can not buy one of these at Target. They are not putting little plastic bins by the workstations in an AWACS plane.
You do realize there are multiple trash cans available, right? Some that are metal. Of many different sizes.
It would take less time to go store to store across the country and source 4 trash cans than it would to do this ludicrous process.
Certified for use on 707s? Again, this is not the sort of trash can you have in your office. It'll be rated for fire, it'll be in a special cart that fits into a special locking spot in the plane, it will have been tested to stay in that special locking spot if the plane crashes, etc.
It's like trying to buy Commodore 64 parts at Best Buy. Not going to happen.
Apparently you could buy one for $300 though. I own a bin that isn't far off that price, and I'm sure many people on the site have much fancier ones.
Yes, when they were being commercially manufactured for many users.
Now that 707s are no longer in service outside the military, they're not running production lines for parts except when needed; that $200k includes all the paperwork to win the contract, the lawyers who review it, un-mothballing whatever tooling they use, etc.; the fixed costs far outweigh the costs to make each individual trash can. For similar reasons, I can buy a part for my Corolla much cheaper than I can for a Model T.
This is a site apparently populated by fairly bright people. I'm struggling to understand why no one seems to get this.
Not to say the average user here is an idiot, but it's pretty clear that cribbing together code in extremely low-risk environments doesn't impart any understanding of how designing, manufacturing, and supporting critical products over a 5+ decade lifespan is actually done.