[ad_1] By Aaron Gregg | The Washington Post For the Air Force, it is a "wall cover, troop bay latrine ... needed to protect the". airplane against corrosion damage in the latrine. " For us,. And until recently, he had a prize of $ 10,000. Start your day with the news you need from the Bay Area and beyond. The United States said last week that the US Air Force paid about $ 10,000 each to replace the toilet seat covers on the C-5 Galaxy, a military cargo aircraft from the USSR. vietnamese era that is still in use, at least three times and as recently as last year. The reason, they say, is that the aircraft manufacturer no longer produces the piece, forcing the government to order a custom-made one when it needs to be replaced. More recently, the service has been able to reduce the average cost of the toilet cover to around $ 300 using a 3D printer, an approach that senior officials want to replicate for other acquisitions. The chief of media relations, Ann Stefanek, in a telephone conversation and in a separate interview with the Deputy Secretary of the Air Force, Will Roper "We are not now and we will not buy this plane at this price. make it cheaper using 3D printing, "said Stefanek, referring to the toilet seat cover on the C-5." The use of this new process allows us to manufacture parts that are no longer in production and that results in significant savings. " Their comments came after Senator Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, had raised the issue in a letter of June 6 to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, Glenn Fine, who in turn quoted an article from May 29 in the commercial publication Defense One.The Grassley office has published the letter publicly last week the fo Air Force shareholders describe the $ 10,000 toilet cover as a case of the economy of the supply chain turned bad and cargo during the war from Vietnam. Lockheed Martin, the original manufacturer of the aircraft, closed its C-5 production line in 2001, when the military stopped buying new models. But the Air Force still has 52 in its fleet and some of them have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan. Keeping old aircraft ready to fly means that pieces of equipment must sometimes be replaced. Since the Air Force imposes meticulous requirements for the components of the equipment - even the toiletries - this is rarely as simple as a trip to Home Depot. The Air Force says the Lockheed C-5 production line is no longer active. It's not a company with a fully equipped assembly line ready to produce exactly what it needs. This means that the government must hire a manufacturer to make a mold of the original toilet seat cover, remodel the two-dimensional designs to make sure the lid fits, make a mold for the room, then produce it - effectively invert the toilet cover and build it from scratch. A profit-minded government entrepreneur might be persuaded to absorb these costs if he could divide them into hundreds or thousands of toilets. But when profits are only one sale, companies demand a higher price. Yet, Air Force officials have said that such situations should be preventable. "If we can not manufacture ourselves what the market can produce at a profitable level," said Roper. "But of course, we should not pay the industry for something we can do ourselves cheaply." Legislators who plan to increase military funding do not seem to take this argument seriously. After all, it's a piece of toilet In his letter, Grassley reprimanded the Department of Defense about what he called a "scam of spare parts". He made parallels with a similar incident in the 1980s toilet, in which it was revealed that the toilet seat itself was costing $ 640. The toilet seat became a symbol of government waste in the Reagan era; Washington Post's cartoonist, Herblock, often represented Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger with a toilet seat around his neck. "Thanks to Mr. Roper ... we now have, 30 years later, an updated price for one," Grassley writes, describing Roper's rationale as "not believable" and "requiring scrutiny" Advocates of Good Governance also reprimanded the Air Force [19659002] "The fact that the Air Force paid $ 10,000 per seat last year is cause for concern because that it shows a lack of foresight of the needs and sound financial management of taxpayers' money, "said Scott Amey, general advisor of the government nonprofit project. Loren Thompson, a consultant in defense who works for the Lexington Institute, a think tank that receives funding from defense contractors, said that he fears that the military can not buy the next "There are probably thousands of examples like this since since the war e cold, the whole fleet is aging, "he said. "Once the parts are out of production, their replacement becomes extremely expensive because they all have to be made to measure. On the other hand, no one wants the toilet to have no top when making a 90 degree turn. This could be a problem. About 70 per cent of this The Air Force budget is used to "support" aging equipment. These costs apply not only to Air Force cargo planes, but also to Army vehicles such as the M1 Bradley tank and the Navy's Ohio class nuclear submarines, for example. Some important systems are older than the C-5: Boeing's B-52 Stratofortress, which theoretically would be among the options of the US military to provide a nuclear warhead in the event of a nuclear war, dates back to the 1950s. 19659002] These vehicles become more expensive to maintain as they get older, and taxpayers do not always get the best deal when the military buys parts. The Office of the Inspector General of the Defense Department said in a 2015 summary of 32 coin-related audits that the government has spent $ 154.9 million more than necessary for such items, often because the government has not negotiated effectively. Spending problems include $ 645 for Boeing equipment that was sold elsewhere for only $ 12.50; overpayments for vehicle repair parts that forced the manufacturer of Humvee, AM General, to reimburse the army; and the alleged overpayment for engine parts for the Pratt & Whitney F117 Nighthawk engine. In some cases, the government has been forced to turn to a monopoly supplier because a company holds a patent. That's what happened in late February when manufacturing giant United Technologies got a $ 2.5 billion contract to provide a bag of spare parts like trains from the United States. 39, landing and flight sensors. With Roper One, Roper suggested that one possible solution in such situations would be for the Air Force to simply print the coin and pay the contractor "some kind of markup or royalty." "If we had some kind of license or with them, we should be able to print that part and they get a bribe or a fee and we leave," he said. . "That's what kind of creative thinking we need to do." The Air Force wants to use 3D printing to solve such problems. For more than a year, the service has been using "additive manufacturing" methods to manufacture more durable items such as toiletries and doorknobs, with the intention of moving on to more components. important. Until now, a replacement of the C-5 toilet bowl has been printed using this method, at a cost of around $ 300, says Stefanek Roper says he wants to use technology to eliminate the long-standing inefficiencies of the vast supply chain of the Pentagon. "I want to get where we can provide parts that we can not get anywhere else," Roper said. "Right now, we are responding to parts for planes built decades ago." [ad_2] Source link
