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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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