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Comment by ryana | Hacker News Reader

That's awesome.

$200M per delivery seems a little tight to design and build 25 planes from scratch (the latest version 787 is ~$300M for comparison) but I'm sure they have smart people working on it.

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The 787 was almost as bad as the F-35. Somewhat different problem, though. Theirs was the issue of too many subcontractors with subcontractors with subcontractors and poor control over manufacturing. They literally bought companies that made the parts because they:

1) didn't have the manufacturing means themselves;

2) couldn't control the quality enough via contract measures.

That significantly drove up the cost of the 787 project. Someone really needs to do a good write-up on these two projects as today's version of the Mythical Man Month and similar texts.

A subcontractor can make way more money by internally making parts of substandard quality to ensure they get bought.

This was not deliberate in the cases I'm thinking of. This was a lack of quality control due to the extreme distributed design and development approach Boeing chose with the 787.

Unfortunately we aren't done finding out just how bad the F-35 will be. Or have I missed recent news?

Nope, we aren't done yet. I was just trying to compare it to a project people (here in particular) are probably more familiar with.

Keep in mind a 787 can carry 242 to 335 passengers. The first Booms are going to carry about 50. Significantly smaller plane.

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