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

It is strange how much apologia there is for Boeing in this thread. Why does it have to be somehow the government’s fault or somehow reflective of the actual cost to make the dispensers? Why should Boeing get the benefit of the doubt, especially given their complete failures on their fixed price contracts (Starliner, Air Force One, KC-46 tanker)? They’re so unable to control costs they’re talking about never taking fixed price contracts ever again. Given those failures, it seems safe to assume they’re screwing taxpayers on their cost plus contracts.

It's strange how much some people are assuming this is as a result of a mistake or incompetence instead of simple corruption.

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

> "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.

Shouldn't risk factor into the equation? If your soap dispenser breaks, yeah that sucks and it's maybe a little gross, but you can just replace it with you land. I struggle to imagine what rule about soap dispensers was written in blood.

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"

> If your soap dispenser breaks, yeah that sucks and it's maybe a little gross, but you can just replace it with you land. I struggle to imagine what rule about soap dispensers was written in blood.

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.