this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
601 points (99.3% liked)
Not The Onion
12295 readers
1026 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Stories like this are sometimes more complicated than they appear. The infamous examples of $500 hammers, for example, were anti sparking hammers for working around flammables or munitions, hence requiring special materials, certification, and low production runs.
For this case, we have liquid hand soap dispensed by a pump. Pumps require a sealed vessel. Unlike commercial planes, military planes are required to anticipate prolonged operation with an unpressurized cabin. At max altitude of a C17, atmospheric pressure is only 20% of sea level. Off the shelf dispensers are unlikely to be designed to withstand that pressure difference, let alone function normally. In a high demand environment like aerospace, even apparently minor failures like an exploding soap container needs to be taken seriously due to the possibility of unexpected cascading failures. Why not use bar soap, then? Unfortunately this too has complications, like not being able to be securely mounted, liquid soaps having superior hygiene and cross contamination characteristics, and necessity for military standardized soap, sometimes designed for heavy metal, eg lead, which is likely if the cargo were munitions.
This unusual set of requirements unlikely to be seen outside the military context, so whether designed by Boeing or off the shelf the unit would likely have low quantity manufacturing runs, significantly increasing per unit costs. Combine that with the necessary certifications and the per unit costs balloon even further.
While a soap dispenser having an 80x markup seems absurd, it might be more reasonable than it seems at first glance. To be clear, there absolutely is military contractor graft. I just don't expect even a $10,000 soap dispenser would be a substantial proportion if it even within the C17.
Let's not also forget the fleet of passenger aircraft for distinguished persons, maintained by the military, with everything custom made and embroidered with presidential seals and produced in the USA and run through vigorous inspection to prevent microphone or pagers or something inside your soap dispenser.