[awb]

Customer’s demands are rarely arbitrary. Time is money and there are typically many moving parts to any corporate strategy.

For example, if the customer’s plane isn’t delivered on the agreed upon date, you now have pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, etc. that need to be paid for no work, or let go and new hires made / trained at a later date, which is expensive. It’s also lost revenue and market opportunity.

There’s also the potential that the customer cancels their order and buys a different plane from a different manufacturer.

Agreed you can’t put out a plane that’s not safe, but you can pay overtime, or shift resources between projects, etc., to produce a safe plane and try to deliver on time and limit the above negative effects on the customer.

In general, if you ask someone when they want something done by, they usually say “as soon as possible”, not because it’s arbitrary but because there’s typically real world value in completing a task / gaining access to an asset sooner rather than later.