I have a 3D printer, and I made a desk trash can.

I even gave it a fancy pattern.

I used FreeCAD.

It took 5 minutes to make the trashcan, and 2 nights to learn the pattern tool.

Total cost was 1.50 for my fancy color changing filament.

And you did, at least, go through full ISO 9100 certification, as the minimum to make the long list of suppliers for flying parts.

It is becoming so frustrating to read all those tech bro comments, believing that doing some messy 3D printing is the same thing as manufacturing. Ignoring that the whole field of mechanical engineering exists.

Thinking like that, a bunch of millions, get you the Titan and five dead people. Add some billions and it gets you FSD and a bunch of dead people.

Oh, and accounting and cost calculation seems to be a black art as well...

I'm talking about a desk trashcan though, at $100 an hour, it cost $400 to design.

By the way I'm a (real) engineer and I did design mechanical engineering for 5 years and electrical design engineering for 3 years. (and other fields of engineering for 4 years total as well)

Yes, you get your specs and you design to them.

I got real engineering parts certified and I believe the total cost, including tooling was under 600k. Heck, back when I made airbags, I don't think we spent anywhere close to 1 million dollars between design, tooling, testing, and manufacturing.

All nice and dandy. And now imagine doing all that according to some obscure military aviation certification standards from the 50s. For a handful of parts. When you are the only reasonably available supplier.

Aerospace is different from automotive, just how different is only apparent by actually suffering through it. And as I said elsewhere, 200k to keep four highly specialized military planes in the air is, as stupid as it sounds, almost a no brainer.

>200k to keep four highly specialized military planes in the air is, as stupid as it sounds, almost a no brainer.

That implies that the trashcan designed for less would cause failures.

Also the cost of the program was 1.3M or something.

That actually depends on how you define failure.

Now we come to a peculiarity of aerospace, so excuse the tangent. All aircraft have to be airworthy to be allowed to fly. Those airworthiness criteria are set during initial Type Certification, and more or less set in stone. Changing them requires various amounts of testing, re-certification and abton of paper work nobody in their right minds does voluntarily. One reason one does it is obsolescence of parts or technology.

One of things I insist on, for that very reason, is in being smart in defining begnin things like BoMs and maintenance plans. Because deviating from those grounds a plane.

So, if (I have no idea of the E-3 specifics as those arw most likely classified to a certain degree) said trash bins are part of the airworthiness requirements, not having them (and them being up to spec) grounds the plane. Because the absence of said trash bin is a defect in itself.

Whether or not the trash bins are a signigicant safety problem is, decades after the E-3 got certified, no longer relevant.

Aerospace is fun sometimes.

My background is medical devices (21CFR), not aerospace. The "story" I like to tell about how much procedures matter is the stack of $1,200 single board computers I was offered because when they arrived on the loading dock, the person from Receiving didn't follow the proper procedure, so they couldn't be sent to Manufacturing to be assembled into the $700,000 instrument we sold but were instead heading for the dumpster.

$12,000 in perfectly working hardware that had to be scrapped because someone didn't fill out the proper paperwork. Luckily, we (software dev) intercepted them and found other uses for them.

Lately I saw quite some mobility from aerospace to the medical world, since basic processes are similar enough. The message behind your example was driven home to me almost on day one by grizzeled, old ops procurment collegue of mine: parts without proper documentation are basically worthless.

Lucky for you so being able to reuse that hardware!

All roads lead to "the situation is completely fucked up." The more immovable the reasons are for the $50,000 trashcan, the more evidence we have that something is systemically wrong. The best case scenario is that this was fraud and without it the trashcan would cost a reasonable price. But if it just "has to be this way" then it's clear that the existing processes are terrible.

The existing processes made modern aerospace and aviation the only Six Sigma save industry in existence. Processes are just fine as they are, things like 50k trash cans are the edge cases of said very safe environment.

> And you did, at least, go through full ISO 9100 certification

That's not what he said was making it expensive though, was it? He said it was economies of scale. Furthermore, if an ISO 9100 certification is taking a $10 trashcan and making it $50,000 then we shouldn't insist on an ISO9100 certification.

Can you guarantee it's not going to move around and dump its contents or crush a crewmember when the military plane it's in does evasive maneuvers?

Can you guarantee a fire started in it won't spread to the rest of the aircraft and fill it with noxious fumes?