I'm going to hang my nuts out here for you guys to stomp on, because I
don't have any first hand knowledge of the cost of airplane
manufacturing. But I do have 30 years experience in manufacturing, and
I've seen the inefficiencies with which many organizations operate. You
buy a brand new building in an upscale town and fill it with 20
engineers, 10 office personnel, 6 salesman, two janitors, a couple of
maintenance people, four or five managers, three purchasing agents, four
warehouse workers, five quality control technicians, a roomful of PR
people, and six people actually building the airplanes, then you're
going to have an expensive product. Put me in charge, and you'd have one
pencil pusher for every five assembly workers, absolute max.

Go look at a new car lot, and then go look at some new airplanes, and
give me ONE reason why an airplane costs ten times as much as a car. If
Henry Ford were alive today, he'd be saying, "man, you're some kind of
sinner." He once fired the entire third floor, the accounting
department. Damn pencil pushers were getting in the way of building cars.

China, hell. Give the Cessna plant to Toyota, and we'll be buying 172s
for $40k.