But that project has kickbacks and Boeing accounting is much less sloppy and more transparent.
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It costs $2 million R&D to make 2 planes or 2,000,000 planes. Hell, Apple spends at least (knowing their manufacturing a bit probably much more) that number each year on each product’s R&D. I worked as parts of $3+ million dollar R&D efforts for things much less complicated than Air Force 1.
R&D is a fixed cost, you drop the budget not only do you get less R&D you get slower R&D.
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It would be the same if they were gonna do it to any military plane as well. These are basically one of a kind (well two of a kind) highly customized builds. The plane is always going to be the cheapest part of the bill here. Fitting in all the communications gear is the big money sink. Plus every time I got to see one of the jets land at Paine Field for whatever fixing up that needed to be done there were at least 2 AWACS planes joining it.
somehow this ‘yuuuge’ joke is not as funny now that he’s in office.
I think the world is just going to have to learn to ignore this person.
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Won’t that just be for his time in office? From what I understand a President continues to receive Secret Service protection after they leave office.
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So I’m sure what he meant to add, and just didn’t get to, is that for the duration of his tenure he will fly coach.
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You got it, hence “over the course of 4 years.”
I’d be amazed if Airbus even bothers to show up when Air Force One is being discussed. Aircraft(even in civilian aviation, with all those dubiously solvent ‘national carriers’ being propped up for somewhat unclear reasons) appear to be a National Pride Thing; and while Airbus isn’t in the same league as buying from the Russians or something, it’s definitely the EU’s pork-barrel problem child, not ours.
Really, since Lockheed doesn’t do aircraft in that size class; they might just default to holding the discussion in Boeing’s offices, to save everyone time at arriving on the foregone conclusion.
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Plus those are the exact same people who used to insist “words mean something!”
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They declined when they were asked.
Funnily enough, the aircraft is expected to be built in the US and Airbus didn’t think it was worth building a factory to make 2 A380s.
I guess maybe Lockheed could blow the dust off their Tristar designs, come up with a new composite wing, integrate some new engines and a complete new avionics system, plus all the same upgrades the 747s have. Might work out a bit pricier though.
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The details don’t seem to be public; but my understanding was that the Cold War left some pretty demanding items on the spec sheet: while it spends most of its life doing boring VIP transportation(and we hope it stays that way); theoretical capabilities are supposed to include serving as El Presidente’s aerial apocalypse command and control facility, suitable for maintaining a prolonged bird’s-eye view of mutually assured destruction actually being dished out.
If it were just slapping in a few encrypted phones, upgrading first class to a SCIF; and tacking on a couple of antimissile countermeasures it’d probably be a lot cheaper.
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Yeah, Lockeed certainly builds other large aerospace things, so I don’t doubt their ability to come up with something; but it’d be quite the surprise if they could plausibly beat Boeing on price. The two companies are presumably on roughly equal footing when it comes to the special-fancy-military-bits part of the job; and one of them has aircraft of approximately the right size in mass production(to the degree that aircraft of that size get mass produced) and the other doesn’t.
(As for the ‘made in USA’ requirements, do you know how strictly those are interpreted? Airbus already does a lot of crazy subsystem-shipping because various EU states have their pet component; so if they were interpreted loosely enough, Airbus might have been able to get away with just doing final assembly. It’d still be an absurd white elephant of a factory; but just building a huge box and temporarily bringing in the hardware required to tack together components built elsewhere would have rather lower capital costs than setting up a real production facility.)
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Yeah, I think final assembly is all that would be required.
But the US isn’t going to pick a European aircraft as its highly visible symbol of American power, anyway.
Maybe Trump will stick to this, since he Iikes 757s?
I can imagine that he doesn’t really want to subsume his brand by flying on an aircraft owned by the people. See also; wanting to keep living in Trump Tower, not taking a salary…
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At least Ilyushin doesn’t employ gays, or jews, or whoever the demonized “elite” of the day is supposed to be.
If trump had a share in Boeing stock, you can be sure he would be praising the deal.
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But they’re saving money by destroying unions one step at a time!
The way of the Fiscal Conservative.
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That’s an interesting point, so I looked it up. The Air Force says a C5 can operate on a 6000’ runway, while a 747 needs a minimum 7400’ runway.
I’m still in business with my C5 plan.
I got that, I just wonder what the final cost to the taxpayer will be once passes away.
