j p o wrote:
slowguy wrote:
JasoninHalifax wrote:
slowguy wrote:
Quote:
...it’s in fact the complex requirements instated by the White House Military Office and the Air Force that require such a pricey job.It's also not $24 million just to buy two new refrigerators. The units don't exist, and have the be engineered, built, tested, installed, etc on aircraft that also have to be secure against electronic and physical attack. It's not like they're dropping $24million on a trip to Home Depot to pick up a couple of fridges.
???
It's a replacement, surely Air Force One has existing refrigerators?
I have no opinion on the reasonability of the costs. Any time anything gets added to an aircraft things get very expensive very quickly.
It's not a direct replacement. It's an upgrade, designed to give the aircraft the ability to support longer periods of time between resupply. The idea is that the plane will not need to resupply in foreign countries during visits, because now it will have capacity to carry more refrigerated items for longer periods. The cost includes the engineering of the systems, the prototype development, installation, maintenance records, procedures, and manuals, required FAA testing, and required environmental impact studies for replacement of these particular systems on two of the "Air Force One" aircraft.
We represent a company that does fasteners. They are working on an aluminum 1/4" nut that has to hold 3500 lbs. They don't know what it will be used for or on. Such a nut does not currently exist. There will be thousands of these nuts used on military aircraft, that is all they know.
Down the road someone will want to know how that nut costs $30-$50 each. They have put 1000's of hours into research and testing on this "simple" little nut and had no idea if they could pull it off.
And frequently, these systems and the machining that builds them, have no other purpose and can't be used for anything else. Boeing isn't going to build these units, and the profit off of using the same things on their commercial travel fleet. They'll build them for Air Force One, and then might never build one again.
Slowguy
(insert pithy phrase here...)