Intrinsic cost of planes

And I find that Eurostar is about 270 kg empty weight, 450 kg MTOW…

Wonder how well a modern technology would do mass-producing twin piston planes with, say, 8000 kg OEW?

You can get a new Eurostar for around £50k, which compares quite well with a quality sports car built in similar volume. Unfair to compare aircraft designed in the 40’s and 50’s as such machines were not designed to be built by modern methods.

Rod1

It would be interesting to know how much labour-saving technology Cessna uses for its light singles. I think they run the production alongside their jets so I guess this helps.

AIUI Piper are still very labour-intensive and in my view there is no coindence here when looking at their high asking prices.

Cost of aeroplanes

Uhm – unions…?

Well, maybe for airliners etc.

As far as general aviation aircraft are concerned: back in the 80’s when the big three, Cessan and Piper and Beechcraft were pretty much forced to stop production, it was due to the fact they had to sell their products for about twice as much as necessary in order to cover Product Liability insurance. Somewhere I read a figure of around $50,000 per aircraft. The situation is better now, but still, it must be a big factor.

I don’t think greed comes into it very much; but bear in mind that these companies deal with people who have money to spend, not your average Joe, buying his new Chevy SUV.

As far as volume production goes – I really don’t think that comes into it any more these days. Technology is such that changing a major part is nothing more than feeding in some new numbers into your CNC machinery.

And as with cars, there just doesn’t seem to be any incentive to produce anything cheap – nobody wants to drive a Yugo, even if it does provide perfectly adequate transportation.

A newly built SUV or van weighing 1600 kg seems to cost 2 orders of magnitude less than a jet plane of comparable weight.

A more appropriate comparison would be with a Ferrari or some other exotic, built in the same limited quantities that a modern day aircraft is.

Moggy

Even with modern CNC machines there are still a lot of castings, jigs, tooling, bespoke wiring looms, etc, etc. and all have to be built to the Aviation standards of each state that you are selling into.
There also has to be the crashworthiness and fire retardency, as well as the operational procedures, such as evacuation time, the doors to be able to be operated by the smallest/weakest cabin crew. Watch the documentary on the 777, one of their biggest headaches were the doors, just to sort out the systems interferences, pressurisation and opening mechanisms took a huge team weeks to sort out!

Employee costs seem to suck about 50% of anyone’s profits. See Airbus :rolleyes:

Materials, Tolerances, Volume & Bureaucracy

Materials and Size must have some bearing but modern CNC machines take the tolerances and volume out of the question so one is left with the Bureaucracy.

Probably the same reason that anything built with public money from a road to a building seems to cost an order of magnitude more than a private commercial facility.

It is a function of Materials, Tolerances, Volume & Bureaucracy