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Comment by nvy | Hacker News Reader

Aircraft are fractals of subassemblies. The engines are made in one place, the skin panels in another, the avionics are assembled in one place from components made in yet another, and so on.

Is it such a surprise to you that a complex machine such as an aircraft undergoes final assembly in one place, using parts and components made in another place? This is how just about everything is made.

Did you think Boeing mines its own aluminum ore, alloys it, forms it into panels, makes its own composite turbine blades, and fabs its own silicon chips?

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This is an tiny kit plane from a Czech manufacturer, though, not a company in Tanzania sourcing components from elsewhere for their own design.

It's still great if it lets them build expertise and provides jobs, but they meant it when they said assembled.

>This is an tiny kit plane from a Czech manufacturer, though, not a company in Tanzania sourcing components from elsewhere for their own design.

So? There's more skill in that than in what, say, System76 does. Just installing Linux on a rebranded Clevo laptop and giving it a cringey name.

Tanzania has to start somewhere if they want to grow their industrial base.

So comparing it to an aircraft manufacturer sourcing components and outsourcing in response to someone asking if it meant it was manufactured elsewhere is entirely irrelevant.

This is a plane that anyone can buy off the shelf and put together themselves. You can message the Czech manufacturer on Facebook if you want one. Total cost is around $100k. This isn't Boeing having a lot of subcontractors.

Boeing's first aircraft design was highly derivative of another plane Bill Boeing had purchased. Porsche, regarded by many as having the best-engineered sports cars in the world, didn't have a fully in-house design until 1978 (almost 50 years after founding). Tesla started with a Lotus Elise derivative. Getting started with an existing design and working backward is a well-proven path to building a business when it's something as high stakes and complicated as an airplane.

> Porsche, regarded by many as having the best-engineered sports cars in the world, didn't have a fully in-house design until 1978 (almost 50 years after founding).

Ferdinand Porsche also founded VW so that’s a bit misleading, perhaps even intentionally so. Also the German economic system pretty much kept the good parts of fascism after the war, by requiring companies to work cooperatively both with their workers’ councils and each other.

If/when there is any indication that they are designing their own or adding anything to or modifying the design, then that will warrant a comparison with companies that does that. At present, what they have done is buy an off the shelf kit that comes with parts and detailed instructions and followed the instructions.

Who's claiming that it is?

Why are people in such a rush to shit on this company?

Because this is literally the direct equivalent of a company buying unassembled products from Ikea, assembling them, and then claiming to be a furniture manufacturer. There was no transformative element to what they created, they bought an off-the-shelf consumer kit and built it. Pull out your credit card, invest about 2000 hours of fairly basic manual labor, and you can do the same thing. Tens of thousands of other people have already done so.

>Because this is literally the direct equivalent of a company buying unassembled products from Ikea, assembling them, and then claiming to be a furniture manufacturer.

Please cite where AAL claims to be an aircraft manufacturer.

Nobody is shitting on them. I'm reacting to you comparing them to Boeing. It's great they're doing this, but it's also not something that is meaningful to compare to a company that actually designs planes.

Gotta start somewhere. May as well roll with a proven design.

People build kit planes in their backyards :/

Yea, but after doing so, what you learn is too trivial to teach anyone else because there are hundreds of people near you who know way more.

But do it somewhere less advantaged and you become a valuable resource.

Up until the 787, Boeing was an engineering company who did the lion's share of it's own R&D and fabrication. For all intents and purposes they were effectively the airline manufacturing industry to a lot of people.

The 787 changed all that, Boeing moved their longtime headquarters to Chicago, outsourced all their manufacturing, to follow just in time manufacturing and offload risk to contractors. In more recent years Boeing has started to bring a lot of their manufacturing back in house.

They're not totally vertically integrated like Tesla is attempting to do right now (they just opened a lithium ore processing plant) but they used to build most of their own sub assemblies.

For some people yes. Many people still imagine "Boeing aircraft assembly buildings." You know the ones south of Seattle that combine tires from the tire manufacturer, machined parts from everywhere, engines from another manufacturer, etc into an assembled aircraft.

Maybe 3D printing will truly take us back to "locally assembled" looking more like raw materials in, finished sellable product out. But we know that's probably going to also feel disappointing to someone remembering the way steam locomotives were assembled in those old films about the railways in England. Now that was assembly!

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