Boeing overcharged the U.S. Air Force 8,000% above market for soap dispensers

Because they bought it.

> They’re so unable to control costs

I assume you talk about the government here?

Fair enough, but I was referencing people taking a Boeing exec’s claim that somehow regulations cause military soap dispensers to cost that much at face value.

> I assume you talk about the government here?

No. Read the whole sentence. I’m referencing Boeing and the tens of billions Boeing has lost on fixed price contracts.

"Whoops I made $600 from something that cost me $10"

I've written about this here some time ago - you don't pay for the soap dispenser or trash bin itself, you pay for the paperwork showing that it is safe to install this trash bin, soap dispenser or whatnot into this specific model of aircraft or spacecraft, and you pay for the paperwork that details the entire life of every tiny little piece used to manufacture that component. For flight-critical parts, IIRC that goes as far as to documenting the specific lot of the iron ore that was used to make the metal sheets, so in the event of something cropping up where something got fucked up in the mine or the smelter, you can recall every single part that could be affected. And there's lots of testing (and associated waste) at each part of the step.

Anything that goes into an airplane or spacecraft has ridiculous rules attached to it... rules that were literally written in blood. Aerospace is amongst the safest ways of transportation because of decades of crashes and learning from each and every single one.

Your average Home Depot soap dispenser has none of that, if it breaks it breaks.

MILSPEC is a thing - but unless the soap dispenser involves electronics, I don't think that applies here.

(If someone had bought an IoT enabled soap dispenser for a military plane, that would have been their own stupidity.)

Surely there's a more cost-effective happy medium somewhere between "just buy the Home Depot 2-for-1 special" and "we ran a background check on the guy who mined the metal"

Where can we see this literal blood writings?

A better solution than hiring people to watch for literal scams is to simply not scam people and hold them liable when they're found to have done so.

Your logic is the same as thieves who say, "It's not my fault that I stole their wallet. They should've put it in a slash-proof backpack and locked it with a combination lock that isn't easily picked." Sure, some degree of security and caution is good. But not defending criminal behavior is better.

20 years ago, Boeing had a good reputation. Now it's known as a company that'll pick your pockets and kill you. Quite a downfall.

Depends on the failure mode. Assume the screws with which the soap dispenser is installed are spec'd to wrong torque and the installation causes stress fractures as a result that end up propagating through the aircraft...

Yes it sounds far-fetched, but aircrafts have crashed due to microfractures caused by improper torques on other components...

The very second you start making an exception because "a soap dispenser is trivial", other stuff will get labeled as exempt (or treated as such), eventually there will be no one knowing what is exempt and what is not, and someone will treat something as exempt that clearly shouldn't have been exempt, causing an incident.

In aircraft and spacecraft design and manufacture, the rule is "safety by design". Treating everything as "needs to be certified by default" is fail-safe, it eliminates entire classes of incident causes.

If a piece of military hardware or software fails, one or two or a dozen people die... if they can't eject.

If a piece of civilian hardware or software fails, hundreds of people die. Witness the 737 Max.

The breakdown of the barrier between the military and commercial sides of Boeing has resulted in a catastrophic reduction in quality on the civilian side. So overcharging for soap dispensers on the military side is far more egregious than overcharging for them on the civilian side, because the stakes are actually lower.

I'd actually disagree there. The stakes for military aircraft are higher - assume Russia or China sends a nuclear bomb equipped squad on their merry way to Alaska.

If even one of the US planes has an issue taking it out of the fight, the Russian bomber squad may succeed, dropping a nuke and killing tens of thousands of people.

In fact, Boeing has stated they will no longer bid for fixed price contracts at all. They are institutionally incapable of making money by simply selling a product to the government for a price agreed to up front. Other companies can, but Boeing cannot. It's a rotten company.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/boeing-says-it-cant-ma...

Cost-plus contracts should be emergency measures for wartime only. They should be illegal otherwise. They hurt our country, not just by getting the government scammed by greedy corporations, but also by ruining companies like Boeing that should otherwise be competent and valuable assets to the country.

You'd still need to pay for the certification and audit trail paperwork, and in addition you'd take a part that has already been certified and replace it by a new one that would need to undergo the same certification requirement.

> weight is the enemy, the other is simplicity, : if its not there, it costs nothing, and cant break

Indeed but then you get crews taking their own soaps because they (think they) need to have soap aboard, store them wherever it is convenient for them, and the soap bar then gets loose and flies during the cockpit during a mission because no one thought about securing the soap as it isn't on any checklist.

That is also the reason why even brand new airplanes rolling off the factory line still have ashtrays in lavatories despite smoking being banned for decades now. They account for some dumbass thinking they do need to smoke and better they drop the cigarette in the ashtray (because that's what people do naturally) when the fire alarm goes off, than they dump it in the trash bin, causing the cigarette to set the trash alight and causing a bigger issue.

That is "fail-safe by design". Even if it adds 100 grams per plane to have that ashtray and a bit of work for the attendants to check if it needs to be cleaned out and for the pilots and maintenance crew a bit of work in the MEL check, it is still worth it over losing an aircraft due to a trash bin fire (and yes, that still happens, see the source for this quote!):

> As with just about everything on a plane, it's about safety. "They're there so if someone were to break the rules, they would dispose of the cigarette in the ashtray as opposed to, say, a trash bin full of flammables," says Robert Antolin, chief operating officer at App in the Air. [1]

[1] https://www.travelandleisure.com/why-airplanes-have-ashtrays...

When someone gets tricked in a shell game, is it fine because they voluntarily bought into it? Would you legalize such schemes? Of course any scam (short of outright extortion and robbery) relies on the victim to voluntarily hand over money. We could take a social Darwinist approach to business and say any way you gain an advantage is legitimate as long as it's not by physical force. But obviously something nefarious is going on here, because no one would knowingly overpay by that much for no apparent benefit. It's likely kickbacks were involved. This is fraud, they're stealing taxpayer funds.

Granted 8000% is still absurd, but 1000% wouldn't necessarily be unrealistic.

Literally?

What really makes me livid is that the same people who are in here now screeching about Boeing's misdeeds with no thought given to mitigating facts would instantly grasp the concept of paying for a paper trail and happily use it as justification to crucify some puddle jumping airline operator in Alaska who sourced unapproved stuff.

Feeling entitled to engage in cognitive dissonance like that when it benefits you plays a key role of so many problems in society these days, including shoddy work and overpriced soap dispensers at Boeing

That said, I still think $600 is absurd. The .mil probably already has a soap dispenser thats sufficient that Boeing could have made a mount for.

The idea that Boeing of all organizations is too consistent about adhering to rules written in blood given the 737 MAX debacle and the "whistleblowers falling out of windows" issue is also darkly comical.

"Whoops sometimes our windows fall off mid flight but trust me bro, this soap dispenser is a fucking disaster waiting to happen"

Occam's razor says this is corruption.

As we've seen from the slight "windows falling off planes mid flight" problem which they furiously tried to cover up, Boeing has a bit of a problem with making exceptions where it actually matters.

A far more likely explanation here isn't that Boeing is being too strict and disciplined over all things up to and including a soap dispenser, but that a bunch of people have their noses in the trough and have figured out a hack to drain money out of the federal government budget.

It was screws, maybe? According to the U.S. attorney, the company “grossly inflated prices intentionally”, although according to mschuster91 people just don't understand the level of paperwork needed to create these $37 screws and $600 toilet seats.