
New Air Force One instruction manuals cost $84M - pseudolus
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/air-force/493347-new-air-force-one-instruction-manuals-cost-84-million
======
Scramblejams
I have no knowledge of this particular situation, but...

Before I worked in aerospace as a structural engineer, I couldn't understand
why airplanes are as expensive as they are.

Once I'd worked in aerospace as a structural engineer, I couldn't understand
why airplanes aren't _more_ expensive than they are.

I worked in stress analysis, where you'd analyze a part of an airplane to
determine whether it fulfilled strength/fatigue life requirements. At this
stage, the part's already been designed. So you take the part's material
properties, geometry, surface preparation and coatings, machined features, and
so on, and check it against anywhere from a few dozen to many thousands of
load scenarios. You find the handful of critical load cases, and then you
write up the analysis against those. The analysis is intended to be mostly
self-contained, readable by any qualified engineer, and serve as a complete
treatment of the part's structural sufficiency. It's not much of an
exaggeration to say that every single structural component of an airplane is
backed up by a stress analysis report running somewhere between 20 and 400
pages, written by one or more degreed engineers making what was, in the U.S.
probably an average of $50-60/hr. Airliners are made up of many, many
structural parts. The costs of proving the safety of those parts add up
quickly.

Now, if I had to guess, instruction manuals are probably a bit cheaper to
produce. Tech writers probably aren't as well compensated as engineers. But a
lot of engineers' time will be eaten up nonetheless. (I once spent a memorable
few weeks (!) proving that a dowel pin on a part that hadn't been machined
correctly would not, during installation, shear off, so that existing
installation documentation could still be used. Yay. After that I was known as
the office dowel pin SME.) Good maintenance documents sweat the details and
require input from designers, stress analysts, manufacturing engineers, supply
chain representatives, and others. And then as the design evolves -- the
design always evolves on the way to delivering a product -- these documents
must be tweaked, added to, subtracted from, sometimes entirely rewritten, and
those changes must be checked by a variety of folks.

So, $84 million for 100,000 pages might sound like a lot. But for what is in
many ways a custom built aircraft, with divergences from the base aircraft
that probably run into the millions, to me, it doesn't seem ridiculous.

~~~
WalterBright
Former Boeing flight controls engineer here. Nice to see a stress guy!

I'm always amazed that for a few hundred bucks I can fly halfway around the
world in a jetliner. Anyhow, you might be amused by this incident between me
and the stress guy, when I was called over to visit them:

SG: We're concerned about the parts you're designing.

WB: Um, yes?

SG: Your parts are coming in at barely 1% stronger than the Ultimate Load.

WB: So they meet the requirement. What's the problem?

SG: How did you design them?

WB: I started with the load requirement, worked backwards to size the part,
and rounded up the tolerances.

SG: We don't like that. We like to see 10% over.

WB: So, you want the parts to be overweight?

SG: No, we just feel better about stronger parts.

WB: But my parts meet the requirements at minimum weight. If you'd like
stronger, heavier parts, you guys need to change the requirements.

SG: !@#$%^&*(

Hope you guys aren't still mad at me :-)

~~~
NikolaeVarius
That's surprising from the Stress Guy. The ultimate load by definition should
already have the safety factor + everything else factored in. Having a
requirement go over the ultimate load, means its not really the ultimate load.

~~~
WalterBright
There's always some concern that the math models correctly reflect reality.
That's why there's a 50% safety factor, and it's backed up by the engineers'
experience that things "look right", bench testing, and flight testing. (In
early flight test, they'll tape strain gauges all over the place to see if the
math predictions of the stress matches reality.)

~~~
voldacar
Did you ever experience any times when a part passed the math model, but
didn't "look right"?

~~~
WalterBright
Sort of. I spent much time arguing with Stress over how to calculate the
torsional rigidity of the elevator structure.

~~~
WalterBright
I don't mean to be too hard on Stress. They're good guys, we both had the best
interests of the design at heart. Their manager paid me a great compliment by
wanting me to join their team. But I liked design work too much.

------
downerending
I hate stories like this. Yeah, excellent documentation for an immensely
expensive one-off, bespoke, incredibly complex product costs a ton of money.
Duh.

~~~
badrabbit
Not $84M ,unless you're talking about a death star. And even then! I mean,
back up a bit here, even the greediest tech company (oracle!) Has not thought
of to charge for documentation. On what insane world would someone purchase a
complex product like this without the docs? Why is it billed differently?

~~~
Scramblejams
This works out to $840/page. How many hours does it take to write the page, by
people who are making how much? And don't forget, they get revisited and
revised as the design changes.

On the subject of why it's billed differently: well, first, transparency. What
would you make you feel better? Getting a $4 billion lump quote for a giant
project, or seeing that $4 billion itemized down so you can check the
underlying data?

Edit: Oops, sorry, data entry failure. Thanks for the corrections. Fixed.

~~~
badrabbit
No, things cost what buyers are willing to pay. Transparency would be saying
the product costs the total sum so that everyone making purchasing decison
knows the total cost. A manual in this case is as much part of the plane as is
the wing! The product is a pile of metal without the docs. Is there a separate
cost like this for R&D,labor,parts,paint, "service charge"? I mean come
on,imagine the outrage here if microsoft made msdn cost even $10/year!

Salaried employees don't get paid by hour our output. If it takes a team a
half a year to write the doc, they still get paid for the rest of the year.

Regardless, the cost nevet reflects the effort put into it. It is simply what
they charge because they can and because the buyer pays and because the
competition is not offering something better when bidding.

~~~
Scramblejams
_Salaried employees don 't get paid by hour our output. If it takes a team a
half a year to write the doc, they still get paid for the rest of the year._

One of the reasons I left aerospace is I found out that when a project ends,
you and 2,000 of your closest friends all hit the street at the same time. :-)

Or as another friend put it when we were discussing the big companies: "If you
work for Boeing, you'll always have a job. But you may have to move to Florida
to keep it." And current events show the first part isn't even true any
more...

------
mehrdadn
That's $840/page, right? So like if you have just 1 person responsible per
page, and they cost $100/hr, that's 8.4 hours of work per page? I feel like I
had to spend longer on my high school essays...

~~~
Turing_Machine
Yeah, that doesn't seem unreasonable at all, especially since producing a page
on (made-up example, obviously) maintaining and replacing the starboard
arglebargle frammistat is gonna require that the technical writer spend a fair
amount of time talking with the engineers who designed the frammistat, as well
as the techs who will perform the actual maintenance/replacement work. You've
gotta know how to tell when the frammistat can be safely reused and when it
has to be replaced, how much torque can be applied to it without messing it
up, what lubricants and sealants can and cannot be used, maximum temperature
ranges, _all kinds_ of stuff, because if you mess up the docs, the plane falls
out of the sky and kills the President of the United States, plus potentially
many others on the ground. That would leave a significant resume stain.

Then, of course, the final document needs to be reviewed and signed off on by
all those people, likely with multiple revisions.

8.4 hours per page seems like it'd be on the low side, if anything.

------
zoomablemind
Meanwhile (ok, over a year ago) Angela Merkel took a commercial flight to G20
in Argentina....

[https://m.dw.com/en/man-finds-himself-sitting-next-to-
german...](https://m.dw.com/en/man-finds-himself-sitting-next-to-germanys-
angela-merkel-on-flight-to-g20/a-46533339)

Not by first choice, but still..

Respect!

~~~
netsharc
I'm surprised they couldn't just call Lufthansa and get a plane with crew. But
obviously Lufthansa doesn't just have that lying around, and needing to fly
from Germany to Madrid first would also take a lot of time.

Meanwhile, Trump flew to Switzerland to the World Economic Forum (wow, that
was actually this year, while Wuhan was in crisis) with 2 "Air Force One"'s...

~~~
NickNameNick
I'm sure Lufthansa have aircraft and crew sitting idle now.

As for moving the president around - It's not just the vc-25a 'air force one's

They would have had at least one cargo plane to deliver his car.

And there was probably an E-4 Advance Airborne Command Post somewhere nearby
too.

------
redis_mlc
I'm not going to comment on the cost of the manuals, but on a couple other
concerns:

1) Mechanics and pilots are responsible for knowing the aircraft systems. Who
has time to read and memorize 100,000 pages? How do you recruit new pilots in
an efficient manner?

2) The cost could have been largely avoided by using an off-the-shelf
airplane, instead of a billion dollar frankenstein. Possibly with the
additional electronics in pods that have a limited interface with the airplane
electrical system.

Source: commercially-rated airplane pilot.

------
patio11
Bespoke professional services work costs bespoke professional service work
rates, film at 11, but one factor not already discussed here:

A lot of contracting arrangements like this will ratably assign overhead to
particular change orders or line items in ways which will cause the apparent
cost of the line item to be higher than one might think necessary. This is,
mostly, to avoid there being a "$250k for the manual; $5 billion for
Miscellaneous Expenses" sort of bill.

(The question of whether government contracting is optimal is a long and
involved one outside the scope of this comment.)

------
hedgehog
There is reportedly a lot of specialized gear added so it's not surprising
there's extensive documentation. What I find really surprising is the new
aircraft cuts aerial refueling capability: [https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-
zone/14199/the-next-air-for...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-
zone/14199/the-next-air-force-one-aircraft-will-not-be-able-to-refuel-in-
midair)

------
anonu
I say this often: but not all dollars are created equally. I think the size of
the recent stimulus packages: $2tr and ongoing trillions on top of it are
case-in-point. These numbers are so astronomically large it is hard to fathom
what they mean for the US and what it means for future generations.

My point about the headline number of $84 million... this is not a real number
in that it reflects more than just the cost of manuals. It reflects the
stimulus and backstop of strategically important private defense manufacturers
like Boeing and others.

------
pengaru
Well, Boeing does need money, overpaying for a bunch of crap already in the
works is probably easier than a proper bailout.

Though I imagine both will occur in the fullness of time.

------
wglb
Back in the 90s, the documentation for a fighter jet, if printed out, would
weigh more than the jet itself.

------
gentleman11
How many person years of salary is $84M for that manual from Boeing?

~~~
flyinglizard
Assuming a cost of $200k per person, it's 420 man years, or 100 person team on
a four year buildout like this. It does not sound unreasonable - or at least,
about the right order of magnitude for such an undertaking.

~~~
objektif
What is the undertaking here and what does it involve? Can you please explain?

~~~
flyinglizard
The article mentions the figure of 100k pages. Well, 100,000 pages of high
quality and specific technical writing is quite an undertaking. If we take the
size of the team in my previous post as a given, that's 1000 per writer over
four years, or about 250 pages per year, or about a page per working day on
average. It's quite a bit.

------
exabrial
I oppose 99.88% of taxes because it literally is all spent in this exact
manner (YMMV in other countries, I'm just speaking of the USA). The money is
best kept your pocket. Both Blue and Red need to oppose new taxes and advocate
for keeping money in people's pockets.

~~~
ceejayoz
Out of genuine curiosity, what's the 0.12% of taxes you support?

~~~
exabrial
The stuff that ends up as a rounding error: fire, police, local guard.

