Originally Posted by
ShyTorque
PDR,
You complain that other posters are "playing the man rather than the ball". I suggest you re-read the whole thread and see who is most guilty of that. It's yourself.
Whereas you and your fan club here keep making allegations that I am personally ripping someone off. It's pathetic.
It is the law of the land(s) that the designer/typecert holder/part21 organisation must follow certain processes to "put their certificate on stuff", and that costs money. But if you REALLY believe its such a rip-off then you (as an aircraft owner/operator) have the choice to go your own way. As you will be well aware, the TC/pt21/05-123 organisation has no authority over the aeroplane once it is in service. That authority lies with the CAM (SubPt.G organisation in EASA-speak), and the CAM can choose to simply buy (frexample) the Belkin part from EBay and fit it. If it is such a rip-off why don'y you just do that?
I've asked this question for real, and the answer I received was "If I do that and it goes pear-shaped then I will be the one who is sued because the manufacturers won't accept liability!", which is kinda the point. The Owner/Operator of an aeroplane is responsible for its safety and airworthiness. If you want to be able to "pass back" that liability to an 05-123/TCH/Pt21 organisation then you have to pay the cost they will incur to do the assurance work needed to allow then to take on that liability. And that amount of money is not small. It really is that simple. You may not
like that, but it doesn't make it any less true.
Oh I don't doubt you can find individual examples of unjustified costs, especially on colonial military programmes, but in the UK military programmes they will be much less likely because these procurements are "open book". The QMAC defines fixed profit allowences and the costings are routinely audited. I have no visibility of the alleged USB socket incident, but if it was done as a PDS task then the claimed price hike is probably the cost of the whole activity from initial enquiry through to implementation amortised into a per-unit price.
We haven't heard what this USB socket was for - presumably it was actually wired to some piece of kit rather than just sitting in the panel to make it look blinged-up. So there was a wiring loom that needed to be modified or replaced. If it was a military aeroplane there would then be a number of compatability issues from the simple (does it interfere with anything?) to the complex (does it invalidate the IA clearences of any of the kit it's connected to - does it run too close to red-routed cabling, does the addition of this USB interface invalidate the existing security/safety/airworthiness cases? etc). Even if the answers to these questions are all "It's not a problem" they still have to be asked, investigated and signed-off before an 05-123 organisation can legally "put its certificate on it" (via the Form 714/715 process) to give the CAM a liability crutch to lean on. And that costs money.
You say I am teaching you to suck eggs, yet apparently you still object to the cost of these mandated processes - but not to the point where you are prepared to say "no, I'll save the money and take the liability personally". These are contradictory positions, you know.
I don't know who Tim Lancaster is.
Tim Lancaster was the Captain of the BAC-111 who was sucked halfway out of the aeroplane when the windscreen panel in front of him blew out at FL180 (
BA flight 5390, June 1990 - this wiki page usually comes at the top of the page when you type "Tim Lancaster" into google, btw). The windscreen blew out because >90% of the 90ish bolts that attached it were 26thou undersize, and that was enough to render them useless. The bolts in question were within spec for generic bolts of the same nominal threadform, but not for the aviation-spec version of the same thread. And that's why parts with the same nominal description but no "certificate wrapper" will not cost the same.
But it seems no one here is prepared to listen to any voice that disagrees with them, in a classic example of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
PDR