They had already developed it. How much do you think it costs to design a bin..

How much do you think it costs to restart the production line for a component of an aircraft last made in 1979?

It’s. A. Trash. Can.

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 contain a waste fire so it doesn't burn through the wall of the plane or suffocate the crew.

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 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.

> You do realize there are multiple trash cans available, right?

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.

You will not find a trash can in a store that meets the specifications document that defines an acceptable 707 trash can. There aren’t any being made by anyone that fit the precise military specification, so they must be manufactured at very low volumes, which spreads the overhead across far fewer units, resulting in eye-popping unit prices.

> You can not buy one of these at Target. They are not putting little plastic bins by the workstations in an AWACS plane.

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.

> Apparently you could buy one for $300 though.

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.

> You can not buy one of these at Target

This is a site apparently populated by fairly bright people. I'm struggling to understand why no one seems to get this.

This is a site populated by a group of people that society massively overestimates the intelligence and competence of, and it very often goes to their head. The amount of software developers that actually have any real idea of what rigorous engineering actually is is vanishingly small and those that do usually only "get it" because they worked adjacent to disciplines that take it more seriously.

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.

I bet they’d recoil in horror when they hear that critical systems still use Ada, too. So archaic, so hard to make changes! Why can’t we write the nuclear weapons code in JavaScript or Rust instead?

They only manufactured 68 of the aircraft in question in it's lifetime; I imagine every unit was essentially a custom build.

The article seems to imply they where selling at a normal price until 2010, though it isn't terribly clear.

I see you're moving on to a different argument now. Before it was about R&D, but now that it's been established that we're talking about trash cans for a plane that's been built since the 1950s, the argument is now about economies of scale. For trash cans that each cost roughly the median income of a US full-time worker.

> a plane that's been built since the 1950s, the argument is now about economies of scale

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.)

Yes, that's essentially their argument about economies of scale.

Development costs of what? The trashcan? What could possibly have cost them 50,000xplane frames to develop it in the first place?

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'.

Hey, you must retain the rare talent capable of developing military-grade trash cans at all costs.

Which is exactly how it works. And one of the main reasons why airplanes get more expensive to operate with age. Because it is not just trash cans, but also engine parts, electronics, structural parts...

Some price increase after that would be completely fair and reasonable, because it is harder and more expensive to produce. But 165×? Colour me skeptical on that. At $50k you can hire a craftsman to custom fit something (at a $500k income a year they'd have about a month for 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 revision. Rev 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 they needed, 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.

> 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".

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-...

> 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!"

Unfortunately, both of those things frequently happen simultaneously.

Hyperbole. Orders of magnitude different.

4 extra =/= hundreds extra

---

And why did the government spend $8M(!!) in unused solar panels? I could have gotten 26,000+ trash cans at $300 each!

The article says they needed another 11 the next year. Buying a couple hundred seems sensible if (as I suspect it is) most of the cost is at the project level rather than the unit level.

> 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.

Presumably that would be for the Dept of VA to clarify.

> 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.

> 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.

You don't know in advance that you need 4 extra. Maybe the planes get replaced quickly and you're left with a hundred trash cans, maybe they keep using them for a century and you need a thousand more.

Ok, well just a few more paragraphs down is:

> 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?