[akiselev]

Helicopters, like all flying machines, have much stricter safety regulations while also being extremely low volume. This means that for every part that goes into a production aircraft R&D, tooling setup, and testing will far outweigh the cost of materials, machine time, and assembly. This is very different from an a car where the cost of goods sold (materials, manufacturing, and assembly) is many times more than the sunk costs.

For example, if I wanted to make 30 complex six layer PCBs it can cost on the order of $9,000 at $300 per board. Realistically, $8,000 of that is the cost of labor for setting up all of the machines for the production run but if I wanted to make 1,000 of them the price can drop to $30 or less per board because the static setup cost is now spread across many more units. In aviation, every part is essentially custom and not made very often so you have no choice but to pay that huge overhead every time someone orders a chopper unless you a) batch together manufacturing (large inventory cost and risk) or b) maintain the machinery so that it's always set up to make your parts (large capital equipment underutilization cost). Either way you've got overhead that costs much more than the parts and is unavoidable. If you're lucky you can buy the machining equipment and save lots of money by renting out time like Boeing does with their multimillion dollar five axis machining centers which make very precise turbine blades for a variety of applications like power plants and dams. This rarely makes sense for a business to do however, because then they've got two businesses to worry about.

People are so used to cheap mass manufactured goods that many don't realize just how much more it costs to make anything custom.

[hughperkins]

Seems like there is an opportunity here? Presumably milling machines and so on will start to reduce this overhead, so that the overhead becomes just the cost of creating the original design?

[TeMPOraL]

Come to think of it, there might be some opportunity in standardization. I'm not an aviation engineer so what I say may make no sense, but a good enough set of "bricks" that would let you assemble anything from small twin-seater to a passenger plane would benefit from economies of scale, even if initially such a design would be more expensive and less performant than a custom build.

I guess since it isn't already happening, I'm probably missing something obvious.

[bluGill]

Two obvious things:

Weight and balance is critical for airplanes. You can design the bricks, but you can't stick them together in any combination because a brick that will hold the tail wings for a 400 passenger plane is too heavy for a 100 passenger plane: the plane will not balance right and always be in nose up stall.

Also, there are not enough airplanes made. Even if the bricks idea can work, we still wouldn't make enough to give it significant enough economics of scale.

[nradov]

Helicopters are extremely weight limited. In order to allow for any sort of useful payload, all of the airframe parts have to be designed for a specific model (or range of very similar models). The shapes and mechanical properties needed aren't well suited to highly automated mass production.

Avionics and engines are somewhat standardized "bricks", though.