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.